Turan Research Center

Having failed in their attempt to unseat Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in June, Russia’s allies in Armenia have turned their fire on the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), the US-developed transit corridor passing through southern Armenia at the center of last year’s peace deal with Azerbaijan. Throughout September, pro-Russian parties, Kremlin-linked analysts, and revanchist nationalists in the country have worked from a common script: brand the project as Israeli, call on Iran to stop it, and convince the Armenian public that the corridor will cost them their sovereignty

This campaign is unlikely to derail TRIPP this year. Instead, it is aimed at the constitutional referendum Armenia must hold before the peace treaty can be signed. Washington should move faster than it can mature.

Read the full article on The National Interest.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Washington generally counts three military powers to “matter” in the Middle East: Israel, Turkey, and Iran, the only states in the region able to project force beyond their borders. The Gulf monarchies have spent lavishly on the latest American and European equipment, but they have yet to use it effectively. That view leaves out Azerbaijan, a country of 10 million that belongs to the greater Middle East and sits on Iran’s northern border. The interests of Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, align more closely with America’s than Washington realizes, and as the war with Iran drags on, the U.S. should bring Azerbaijan into its regional defense framework.

Iran has already treated Azerbaijan as a combatant. On March 5, less than a week after American and Israeli strikes began, Iranian drones hit the airport in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan and landed near a school, injuring two people. Two days later, Azerbaijan’s State Security Service said it had broken up an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps plotagainst the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline, the Israeli Embassy, a synagogue, and members of the country’s Mountain Jewish community. Iran’s attacks against Gulf oil facilities drew wall-to-wall media coverage in the West, while the attacks on Azerbaijan were virtually ignored.

This hostility goes back decades. Tehran backed Armenia against Azerbaijan through 30 years of conflict over Karabakh. In 2015, IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani oversaw the creation of an ethnic Azerbaijani proxy to challenge President Ilham Aliyev’s secular government. In October 2022, the IRGC staged exercises on the border in which troops crossed the Aras River on pontoon bridges, a drill Baku read as a rehearsal for invasion. In 2023, Azerbaijan arrested six Iranian agents for planning a coup.

Read the full article on National Review.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla.

Azerbaijan's decision to bar headscarves from its public schools, adopted by the Cabinet of Ministers on September 21, places Baku alongside the Central Asian governments that have fought over the hijab for more than a decade. For all of them, the headscarf sits where four questions meet: who holds sovereignty over religious life, how national identity is defined, whether the secular state can hold, and who controls the institutions that speak for the faith. Each government has given the same answer. The hijab is an import, modesty belongs to the national tradition, and the public school must remain secular.

Foreign powers sharpen the question. Azerbaijan faces direct pressure from both of its large neighbors: Iran, which has long presented itself as the guardian of Azerbaijan's Shia, and Turkey, whose Islamist commentators treat Baku's secularism as an affront to the AKP's own record. Central Asian governments face no comparable state-sponsored challenge to their secular order, though Turkey, Iran and the Gulf monarchies all use mosques, scholarships and religious media as instruments of soft power in the region.

In Central Asia, the pressure comes from below. The hijab is spreading, particularly among young women, and every new school year brings fresh confrontations between devout families and the state. The strongest version of the secular settlement keeps religious dress out of public schools and leaves religious life beyond them largely free, provided it stays clear of extremism and incitement. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have anchored that settlement in law, the courts and a durable public consensus, which makes them the region's secular anchors. Their neighbors illustrate the alternatives: Tajikistan's poor and embattled state tries to strong-arm an increasingly religious population, Turkmenistan prescribes dress by decree, and Uzbekistan enforces the same school rules while increasingly accommodating conservative Islam in other spheres.

Baku between Ankara and Tehran

The decree completes a sequence begun in July, when the Milli Majlis amended the Law on General Education to define the school system as secular and grounded in "national and universal values," and bound pupils, teachers and parents to state dress requirements. Decision No. 309 supplies the mechanism: school pedagogical councils rule on compliance, parents answer for it, and national dress remains welcome at cultural events. The word "hijab" appears nowhere in the text, but no one in Baku misread the target. The sequence also repaired a misstep. In February and March, school directors in Sumgait, Mehdiabad and elsewhere sent hijab-wearing girls home with no legal basis, one school expelling 23 pupils in a day, and quietly relented after rights lawyers objected. Decision No. 309 now provides a legal basis.

Azerbaijan's dispute differs from Central Asia's in origin. It is among the least observant Muslim-majority societies in the world: Gallup has ranked it among the least religious countries anywhere, and only 1 percent of Azerbaijani Muslims told Pew they attend mosque weekly. Demand for the headscarf is concentrated in pockets of Shia observance, such as the town of Nardaran outside Baku, where Iranian influence runs deep. When the Education Ministry first tried a school ban in 2010, protests in Baku and Nardaran drew a public condemnation from the Iranian Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi. The ministry retreated, and the "hijab prisoners" jailed after later demonstrations became a cause for Iran-aligned networks. For a Shia-majority state on Iran's border, the headscarf in the classroom is a question of sovereignty first.

Turkey's reaction exposed the limits of "one nation, two states." Istanbul MP Mustafa Yeneroğlu, a former AKP lawmaker, had already called the spring expulsions "systematic" and warned that Turkey's own experience showed the path to be "a dead end." After the decree, the Islamist monthly Baran accused Baku of reviving "100-year-old Kemalist prohibitionism," and the pro-government daily Yeni Akit gave the story a banner headline. Within days, a Milli Majlis commission on foreign interference and Azerbaijan's media regulator accused unnamed circles in Turkey of running a coordinated social media campaign, with real and fake accounts and targeted advertising, to turn Azerbaijanis against their government and the alliance. Neither named the subject of the posts, and both asked Ankara to act against the organizers. Baku has lodged such complaints before. Its ties with Israel have drawn sustained fire in Turkish media since the Gaza war, and in March, after a drone strike on Nakhchivan that Baku blamed on Iran, a wave of Turkish posts accused Aliyev of doing Washington's and Israel's bidding. Ankara's own disinformation center blocked 41 accounts and appealed for calm.

Turkish religious conservatives react this way because they recognize the policy. The Turkish Republic enforced headscarf bans for decades, and between 2010 and 2017 the AKP dismantled them in universities, the civil service, schools, the police and the military. For the party's base, that campaign is a founding story of rights won from an overbearing secular state. Turkish secularists argue the reverse: that the state owes minors a classroom free of religious identity markers, and that the AKP used the language of rights to advance a political program. Northern Cyprus tested that argument. When a middle school in northern Nicosia turned away a pupil in a headscarf in March 2025, Prime Minister Ünal Üstel's government amended school regulations to permit it. Thousands marched under the slogan "Cyprus is secular and will remain secular," the teachers' union leader Elma Eylem called the change AKP "social engineering," and the TRNC Constitutional Court struck the regulation down that September. A month later, Turkish Cypriots elected the opposition leader Tufan Erhürman president over Ankara's preferred candidate. In Nicosia as in Baku, defending the secular school has become a way to mark distance from Ankara without breaking with it.

Identity, not theology

In Central Asia, the argument over the hijab is at root an argument over who defines national identity after the Soviet Union. The region's states emerged in 1991 with Soviet-trained secular elites, populations whose Islam had been folded into custom, and a religious revival arriving from abroad through missionaries, Gulf-funded scholarships and, later, social media. Governments built official spiritual administrations to train imams and issue rulings the state could accept, and treated Islam outside those channels as a security matter. Dress became the visible border between the two. Nursultan Nazarbayev declared in 2012 that "wearing Arabic hijabs and sending our women back to the Middle Ages is not our path." Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told the National Kurultai in 2024 that the spread of black robes was a thoughtless imitation of foreign norms rooted in fanaticism. Tajikistan's 2024 law bans clothing "alien to national culture." Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have all banned the face veil in public since 2023, and each state promotes a national alternative: the Kazakh kimeshek, the Kyrgyz elechek and jooluk, the Uzbek ro'mol headscarf and do'ppi skullcap, the Tajik atlas dress, and the light scarf knotted at the nape that grandmothers wore through the Soviet decades.

The pressure on these arrangements is rising because the hijab itself is gaining ground, above all among young Central Asians for whom it signals piety, modernity and a break from their parents' Soviet-inflected Islam. Each September brings new standoffs at school gates in western Kazakhstan, the Uzbek provinces and Tajik universities. Azerbaijan has seen no comparable grassroots wave; its dispute is narrower and more geopolitical.

The more durable secular models draw their line at the door of the state. In Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, and in Uzbekistan since its 2021 religion law, a woman may wear a hijab in the street, at a private workplace and in the mosque, and religious practice is broadly protected so long as it avoids what the state defines as extremism or incitement to ethnic or religious hatred. The restriction applies to the public school, the institution these states treat as the instrument of a shared civic identity.

Kazakhstan: a secular model argued in public

Kazakhstan has gone furthest in giving the secular school a constitutional footing. The new constitution, approved by referendum in March and in force since July, guarantees secular education everywhere outside religious institutions. The rule it protects, a 2016 Education Ministry uniform order barring religious attire, has produced a confrontation every September since 2017, concentrated in the more conservative west and south. The courts have fixed its terms: in 2024 the Supreme Court held that a school may not deny a girl her education, but the ministry sets the uniform and parents must comply with it. Tokayev has repeatedly called schools places for acquiring knowledge and religious belief a private matter.

This September tested the model. Education Minister Zhuldyz Suleimenova warned that private schools admitting hijabs could lose their licenses and noted that the National Security Committee sits on the enforcement commission. The state muftiate replied that covering is obligatory for girls past puberty, proposed headscarves matched to the school uniform, and then deleted the post. Olzhas Khudaibergenov, a former adviser to Tokayev, sided with the clerics. The Times of Central Asia read the episode as a split inside the establishment, with the religious camp arguing calmly and the secularists reaching for the security services.

The divide within the elite matters, yet the way it plays out makes the strongest case for Kazakhstan's model. The dispute runs through a constitution, the courts, a ministry and a muftiate that ultimately answers to the state, and it is argued in the open. The secular side also commands a public that shares its instincts: in Pew's survey, only 18 percent of Kazakh Muslims called religion very important in their lives.

That public has also watched the hijab promoted in ways that resembled a marketing campaign more than a religious awakening. In early 2023, several Instagram influencers with audiences in the millions, accounts built on luxury brands, beauty content and beach photos, adopted the hijab within weeks of one another and began posting religious content. Kazakh media reported that bloggers had been offered money to cover. The television host Dinara Satzhan said bloggers had told her the sums were large, and Gulnara Bazhkenova, editor-in-chief of the news site Orda, observed that the synchronized change of lifestyle looked from the outside like a marketing strategy. The muftiate denied any paid campaign, and no one established who, if anyone, was paying. The trend then reversed almost as abruptly as it began. Since late 2025, a string of Kazakh singers and bloggers have publicly removed their headscarves, several citing a long inner struggle; the million-follower blogger Aruzhan Abilova told her audience in August that she hoped God would one day allow her to cover again. For many Kazakhs, the episode reinforced the suspicion that the hijab's spread owes as much to money and fashion as to faith.

The alternatives

On the hijab, Uzbekistan looks like its neighbors. It fines the face veil, bars the hijab from state schools and permits only a light national headscarf tied to leave the chin uncovered. On other religious questions, it has moved in the opposite direction. Since 2016, Shavkat Mirziyoyev has restored the call to prayer, cut the security services' blacklist of suspected extremists from more than 17,500 names to about 1,350, and lifted the ban on religious dress in public. The state has also made room for pundits and preachers whose views Karimov would have treated as subversive. Kamoliddin Rabbimov, among the country's most prominent political commentators, has praised Mirziyoyev for treating Islam as a source of national unity and welcomed the appointment of an education minister open to headscarves in schools. Abror Mukhtor Aliy, a preacher with some 1.1 million YouTube subscribers whose sermons on gender and sexuality have repeatedly provoked public outrage, has held posts at both the official Muslim Board and the state's Center of Islamic Civilization. When one of his statements set off a public backlash, the center apologized for his remarks and then gave him a new position. The strategy co-opts the religious revival by bringing its loudest voices inside state institutions, and it gives official standing to views on women's place that run well beyond the school uniform rules. Uzbek secularism is firm at the schoolhouse door and increasingly negotiable beyond it.

Tajikistan has the region's widest divide between government and population. The country entered independence through a civil war, from 1992 to 1997, that killed tens of thousands and pitted the secular government against an Islamist-led opposition. It remains the poorest of the former Soviet republics, with remittances from migrant workers, most of them in Russia, worth nearly half of GDP. Religiosity was rising well before the state's harshest measures: in Pew's 2011–2012 survey, half of Tajik Muslims called religion very important in their lives, and 27 percent favored sharia as state law. Extremist influence reaches the country from several directions. Tehran received the exiled leader of the banned Islamic Renaissance Party as a guest of honor in 2015, militant networks operate across the Afghan border, and more than 1,300 Tajiks went to fight for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Among them was Gulmurod Khalimov, commander of Tajikistan's own special police, who defected in 2015 and became the group's minister of war. Most of the recruits were radicalized as migrant workers in Russia, and all four gunmen charged in the March 2024 Crocus City Hall attack near Moscow were Tajik citizens.

A government with few resources has answered with force. It barred the hijab from schools in 2007 and from public institutions in 2009, banned the Islamic Renaissance Party in 2015, has closed more than 1,500 mosques since 2011, and in 2024 outlawed "alien" clothing in public, with fines of about $730 for private citizens, more than four months' average wages, and up to $5,000 for officials, clerics and businesses. Women have been turned away from hospitals over their headscarves and men forced to shave, even as officials deny that any ban exists. The measures have pushed religiosity out of public view without closing the gap between a narrow secular elite and an increasingly devout society.

Turkmenistan has removed the question from society altogether. It needs no hijab law because it prescribes women's appearance directly through unpublished presidential "recommendations": national dress for teachers, students and civil servants and, since 2025, yellow headscarves and dresses for women working in Ashgabat. Turkmen women are effectively required to cover their hair, provided the headscarf is the state's. Kyrgyzstan sits at the opposite pole. It is the only state in the region that allows the hijab in the classroom, and it has the densest network of Islamic schools and, in Pew's data, the strongest support for sharia as state law, at 35 percent. Even Bishkek banned the face veil in 2025, citing the mufti's ruling that it was a foreign trend. Its tolerance in the classroom reflects a weaker state and a more religious society, and the face-veil ban shows how quickly that tolerance narrows once the government decides a practice is foreign.

Two anchors

Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan stand apart because their secularism rests on consent as well as force. Both have written it into law, Baku by statute and Astana in its constitution, and both route disputes through courts and ministries and publish the rules they enforce. Both keep the restriction at the schoolhouse door and leave religious life beyond it free. Both govern publics that largely share the premise: in Pew's survey, they recorded the region's lowest support for sharia as state law, at 8 and 10 percent.

Each has a vulnerability. Azerbaijan's lies in enforcement, where a security-first approach risks handing Iran-aligned networks the grievance they cultivated after 2010. Kazakhstan's lies within its elite, where a muftiate willing to contradict a minister in public, and former presidential advisers willing to side with it, suggest the consensus is thinner at the top than the constitution implies.

The regional powers will test both. Iran's interest in Azerbaijan's Shia has only sharpened since this year's war. Turkey's challenge is subtler and harder to manage, because it comes from an ally. Ankara presents the Organization of Turkic States as a civilizational community, and its religious institutions and pro-government media carry the AKP's model of public piety into the region. Baku and Astana work closely with Ankara on energy, transport and security, but neither lets a partner dictate its foreign or domestic policy, and Northern Cyprus showed the same resistance in Turkey's closest dependency. The hijab dispute shows that, for Baku and Astana, alignment with Turkey leaves room for their own answers on religion and the state.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an Expert at the N7 Foundation, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Russia’s war in Ukraine accomplished something no American strategy could have engineered on its own: It hollowed out Moscow’s grip on its former empire. The White House noticed and moved. Congress still has not.

The Trump administration has moved at a remarkable pace. In August 2025, Washington displaced Moscow as broker of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, hosting both leaders at the White House and producing the framework that closed out a conflict Russia had spent three decades managing for its own benefit. Out of that came the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, a transit corridor under joint U.S.-Armenian control across southern Armenia that closes the missing link in the Middle Corridor — the trade route that moves goods from Asia to Europe while bypassing Russia and Iran entirely.

Read the full article on the Washington Examiner.
Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Central Asia is again a focal point of global power dynamics. Moving past the US military presence during the Afghan war, the region’s vast critical mineral reserves, trade routes such as the Middle Corridor, and strategic position bordering China, Russia and the Middle East have reignited major competition. As Russian influence wanes and China, Turkey, Azerbaijan and the West expand their reach, a new ‘Great Game’ may be underway.

In an exclusive interview with Moneycontrol, Joseph Epstein—Director of the Washington-based Turan Research Center, Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and Fellow at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center—breaks down the impact of 9/11 on Central Asia and decodes the region’s new geopolitical landscape.

Read the full interview on Money Control.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Every day Ukraine keeps fighting, Russian influence grows weaker in the countries of the ex-USSR that Moscow refers to as the “near abroad.” Nowhere is this clearer than in Armenia, where decades of Russian dominance are now being challenged by the United States and others.

In February, JD Vance became the first US vice president to visit Yerevan, arriving with a civil nuclear agreement and an $11 million drone package. In May, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a strategic partnership charter, a critical minerals memorandum, and a framework agreement for a US-developed transit corridor across southern Armenia.

Russia has been unable to stop any of this American outreach. It cannot. The capacity Moscow once used to police its periphery is being consumed in Ukraine. While the front lines of Russia’s invasion move slowly back and forth, the imperial infrastructure underpinning Kremlin influence throughout the former Soviet Union is visibly eroding.

Read the full article on The Atlantic Council.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Turan Research Center director Joseph Epstein was quoted at length by Independent Arabia in an analysis by Ahmed Abdel Hakim on whether the political track between Washington and Tehran has closed, as Pakistani- and Egyptian-backed mediation efforts struggle to restore talks that have not been held since the June memorandum of understanding collapsed.

Epstein located the core problem in how the two governments understand negotiation itself. "The two sides come to the table with opposing ideas about what it is for," he said. Tehran treats talks as a strategic instrument — a mechanism for extracting concessions and relieving pressure — rather than a route to settlement, while American practice runs in the opposite direction, on the assumption that talks are where problems get solved. That divergence accounts for most of what looks like dysfunction in the process. Trump, in his reading, understands this far better than his predecessors did, and is now using negotiations strategically as well.

The Iranian approach he described as long-established and tested: Tehran signals readiness to sign, extracts the maximum available concessions, and then, at the moment everything appears agreed, reopens settled clauses and declares the terms unacceptable in order to win another round. It worked well against the Obama and Biden administrations, he said, because neither had any appetite for confrontation. The Trump administration is harder to read, and Epstein rejected the common explanation that its policy tracks the president's mood. Different factions inside the administration take the lead at different moments with different objectives — a pattern visible in the handling of Ukraine. When Vice President JD Vance took charge of negotiations with both Russia and Iran, his approach rested on accommodation and failed in both cases, which pushed other voices and options forward. What distinguishes Trump, in Epstein's view, is rapid adaptation and an insistence on not signing an agreement he considers bad, which is why he halted the Vance track rather than letting it run.

On the current standoff, Epstein described a race over who absorbs the cost. "Both sides are trying to buy time, each convinced the other will break first," he said. Tehran is under real pressure from the economic blockade, and its calculation is that Washington's attention will move elsewhere before the Iranian economy gives way. Trump is watching oil and gas prices ahead of the midterm elections and has reasons to avoid shocking the global economy, so his assessment is that Iranian hardship is compounding faster than American political patience.

He was skeptical that the disputed files can be resolved without a fundamental shift on one side or the other, and neither government appears close to making one. Even if weeks of negotiation produced a text, the change in objectives that would make that text durable would still be missing — leaving either a dead end or a short-lived agreement that erodes as Tehran tests its limits. His expectation is that the conflict continues at lower intensity until something breaks: the Iranian economy, the regime's internal cohesion, or American political will to sustain the pressure.

Read the full interview on Independent Arabia (Arabic).

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

New Delhi: India is emerging as the biggest “loser” in the new “Great Game” unfolding across Central Asia, even as China, Russia and the United States make aggressive inroads into the region, said Joseph Epstein, director of the Turan Research Center in Washington and a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, in Delhi on Thursday.

Delivering a lecture at an event hosted by the Chintan Research Foundation, Epstein invoked the 19th century rivalry between the British empire and Russia in the region, saying, “The trick to engaging Central Asia is providing a counterbalance to prevent over-dependence on the other great powers in the region.”

Landlocked and ringed by Russia, China, Afghanistan and Iran, the region’s singular goal is avoiding dependence on any one patron, he said. Chinese investment sits alongside American mineral ventures; Russian security guarantees run parallel to European financing; Turkish drones share runway space with Israeli technology. “They are looking for a portfolio, not a patron,” Epstein said.

Read the full interview on The Print.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Turan Research Center director Joseph Epstein was quoted at length by Azattyq Asia, the Russian-language Central Asia service of RFE/RL, in a feature on whether the China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway (CKU) now under construction will compete with the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route through Kazakhstan, or whether the region's corridors will consolidate into a single network.

Epstein treated the current interest in new routes as a structural shift rather than a temporary reaction to geopolitical shocks. Those shocks exposed weaknesses in the traditional routes through Russia and Iran, and logistics planners have now seen how quickly a political decision can disrupt shipping — a lesson that outlasts any particular conflict. "Cargo doesn't look for the cheapest route; it looks for the most predictable one," he said. "A corridor that is 20 percent cheaper but closes periodically is worth nothing to a company bound by delivery deadlines." China's own investment in the Middle Corridor is the strongest evidence: "When the country with the largest shipping volumes begins hedging against risks tied to its own partners, that isn't a reaction to the news cycle. That is a structural calculation."

He was measured on whether the Middle Corridor can replace the Russian route in the foreseeable future. Geography constrains it: a multimodal corridor that loads cargo onto rail, then onto a vessel, then back onto rail is structurally more expensive than an end-to-end overland haul, and every transshipment adds cost, time and a potential point of failure. The imbalance between westbound and eastbound traffic and the gap in scale compound the problem. Substitution, however, is the wrong benchmark. "The question isn't whether the Middle Corridor replaces Russia, but whether a better alternative exists. It doesn't. And the corridor has improved substantially on the metric that matters most: transit time has fallen from 28–32 days to 13–17." For the states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus, he added, the value of a corridor extends well past transit fees — terminals, logistics services, customs revenue and the leverage a transport hub carries all arrive with the cargo.

Epstein described Beijing's approach as maximizing optionality. "Its strategy isn't to pick one winning route, but to ensure that no single route and no single partner can hold Chinese trade hostage. China is effectively building 'middle corridors' inside the Middle Corridor itself." CKU is the clearest expression of that logic, since it creates a southern path that does not depend on the Kazakh crossings at Dostyk and Khorgos — a mirror image of the multi-vector foreign policies the Central Asian states themselves practice. Optionality is valuable, and it carries a price: the gauge break reduces CKU's efficiency, instability in Afghanistan complicates the Trans-Afghan line, and some new directions may remain standby options rather than functioning corridors.

Over the next five to seven years, Epstein expects Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan to remain the principal beneficiaries of transit. Kazakhstan holds a more direct and less complex route from the Chinese border to the Caspian, two operating crossings, and continuing investment in ports, fleet and rail; alternative routes may trim its share without displacing it. Azerbaijan's position is more secure still, because the main western routes bypassing Russia and Iran converge on its territory. Uzbekistan is the country to watch: "It has the largest population in the region and a developed manufacturing sector, and with CKU it is deliberately buying itself a transit role it didn't previously have." Kyrgyzstan gains strategic weight while accepting dependence on Chinese financing.

The word "race," in Epstein's view, misdescribes what is happening. "These states aren't simply fighting over a fixed volume of cargo; the more of them that become viable hubs, the more resilient the corridor becomes as a whole, and the more leverage the region gains collectively. Redundancy — spare routing capacity that guarantees reliability — is the main product being sold here."

Read the full article Azattyq Asia (Russian).

Joseph Epstein is DIrector of the Turan Research Center.

Director Joseph Epstein spoke with Viktor Mailin of the Kazakhstani outlet Check-Point.kz about what a visiting U.S. congressional delegation's trip means for the relationship between Washington and Astana — a visit timed to coincide with elections for Kazakhstan's new unicameral parliament.

Epstein argued that the composition of the delegation mattered as much as its presence: it included the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the body that would have to act to remove Kazakhstan from the Jackson-Vanik amendment. "Congress controls two things no president can provide on his own: the federal budget and U.S. trade legislation," he said, while cautioning that a visit is not yet a vote.

He laid out three areas where legislative engagement could matter: trade (removing Jackson-Vanik requires an act of Congress), investment financing (bringing U.S. capital into projects like the Cove Kaz tungsten mine and Middle Corridor connectivity), and historical precedent — the Nunn-Lugar program, a congressional initiative that helped dismantle Kazakhstan's Soviet-era nuclear arsenal. He proposed a standing "Kurultai-Congress" group for regular delegation exchanges.

On Kazakhstan's political modernization, Epstein said institutional reform matters differently across sectors: a single oil major can operate within a specially negotiated framework, but building a diversified portfolio of critical-minerals projects requires the whole system to function well. He was more measured on security cooperation, noting real constraints from Kazakhstan's CSTO membership and its ties to Russia, while pointing to genuine openings in counterterrorism and nonproliferation.

Asked about Kazakhstan's multi-vector foreign policy, Epstein pushed back on the idea that it amounts to a balancing act: "The United States isn't competing to be Kazakhstan's main partner. It's competing against exclusivity." In his view, Kazakhstan's independent posture only raises its value to Washington — as an anchor state for the Middle Corridor, a source of critical minerals, and a model of a sovereign Central Asian state.

Read the full interview on Check-Pointkz (Russian).

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

For three decades after the Soviet Union collapsed, governments across Central Asia and the South Caucasus made foreign-policy decisions with one question always in mind: What will Moscow allow?

They have stopped asking.

Kazakhstan supplies rare earths to America and tells Vladimir Putin to end his war. Armenia has written EU membership into law and stopped showing up to Russia's military alliance. Azerbaijan hosts conferences on Russian colonialism and helps build Ukraine's railways. Moscow has found no way to make them start asking again.

The war in Ukraine, which has consumed the military and economic resourcesRussia used to police its periphery, is only part of the explanation. The deeper problem is how Russia managed these relationships in the first place. Putin relied on coercion: frozen conflicts on their territory, trade embargoes when they strayed, and the standing implication that Russian troops could arrive if matters went far enough. Russia's economic presence was real but built to bind rather than to build—stakes in export pipelines, control of transit routes and power grids, leverage over the migrant labor on which several economies depend. Russia never became a source of technology, capital or security that made these countries stronger. Influence of that kind requires the capacity to frighten. Ukraine drained the capacity, and little else was holding them.

Read the full article on Newsweek.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Last month, a senior Afghan Taliban official managed to insult one of the few governments actively courting his regime. Sheikh Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, Kabul’s acting minister for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, was reported to have declared that Islam in Uzbekistan—the land of Imam al-Bukhari and Imam al-Tirmidhi—exists “only on people’s lips.” Both capitals scrambled to contain the damage. Tashkent’s foreign ministry dismissed the reports as “disinformation”; the Taliban ministry sent a letter praising Uzbekistan’s Islamic heritage, though it never quite explained why excerpts of the speech had appeared on its own channels before being deleted.

The row was brief, but it was revealing: less for what Hanafi said than for how little he apparently knows about his northern neighbor. Far from existing in name only, Islam in Uzbekistan is undergoing its most dramatic revival since independence. And an increasingly ultraconservative, politicized strain of it has moved from the repressed margins into the mainstream—tolerated, and at times cultivated, by the very government now protesting its piety to Kabul.

Read the full article on The National Interest.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

As Joseph Epstein, Director of the Washington-based Turan Research Center, observes, "The Azerbaijan-Israel relationship is what reliability looks like: two nations that have been there for each other in the hardest moments, from defence technology when Baku was isolated to energy security during Israel's recent war." He further argues that because the relationship rests not only on shared strategic concerns regarding Iran but also on genuine cultural ties and a commitment to multiculturalism, it has become "a model that should inspire Israel's relations across the Muslim world." Together, these developments illustrate that post-2020

Azerbaijan-Israel relations have matured into one of the most resilient and strategically consequential partnerships in Eurasia.

Read the full article on The Research Institute for European and American Studies.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla.

How Astana went from a handshake at the United Nations to the front of the line in Trump’s Washington — and why the rest of Central Asia stands to gain from it

On July 10, Donald Trump and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev spoke by phone. The Kazakh president congratulated his American counterpart on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, reviewed the implementation of agreements struck during his November visit to Washington, restated Kazakhstan’s long-held position on the inadmissibility of nuclear proliferation, and extended an invitation for Trump to visit Kazakhstan.

The call was not an isolated courtesy. It capped eight months of engagement between Astana and Washington that is without precedent in the thirty-five-year history of the relationship: a White House summit, accession to the Abraham Accords, twenty-nine commercial agreements worth some $17 billion, invitations — extended to both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan last year — to the G20 summit Trump will host in Miami, and a stream of senior American visitors to Astana, from Senator Steve Daines to Special Envoy Sergio Gor to executives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. American investment in Kazakhstan has passed $100 billion, with a stated ambition to reach $137 billion. Jeff Erlich, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Kazakhstan and whose experience in the region dates to the late 1990s, told The New York Times that the business relationship “has never been better.”

That this is happening under an American president famously indifferent to regions that cannot offer him deals is not a paradox. Kazakhstan has things Trump’s Washington wants — critical minerals, uranium, a trade corridor that bypasses Russia, Iran, and China — and a leadership that has proven unusually adept at reading this administration’s transactional grammar. But the story is larger than one president’s dealmaking. It marks the moment when Central Asia’s largest economy moved from the periphery of American strategy toward something closer to its center, and when Kazakhstan consolidated its claim to being the region’s political anchor.

From Handshake to Front of the Line

It did not start out this way. For much of 2025, Uzbekistan looked like the Central Asian state best positioned in Trump’s Washington. At the UN General Assembly in September, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev was granted a formal meeting with Trump and left New York with an $8.5 billion order for twenty-two Boeing 787 Dreamliners. Tokayev, by contrast, had to settle for a handshake. Kazakhstan’s own headline agreement at the time — a $4.2 billion contract with the American rail manufacturer Wabtec to renew its locomotive park — was substantial, but it lacked the Oval Office theater. Some in Astana suspected that Sergio Gor, the Tashkent-born Trump confidant confirmed in October as ambassador to India and special envoy for South and Central Asian affairs, harbored a natural sympathy for the country of his birth.

The balance shifted in November, around a piece of Trump’s legacy that money cannot buy. When the five Central Asian presidents gathered at the White House on November 6 for the C5+1 summit — the first time all five had met an American president inside the building, on the tenth anniversary of the format — Trump announced that Kazakhstan would join the Abraham Accords, the first country to do so in his second term. “The first of many,” he posted. The Accords are central to how Trump wants his foreign policy remembered, and Tokayev had handed him a fresh signatory at a moment when the initiative had stalled. Kazakhstan also joined Trump’s Board of Peace, the body created to oversee the Gaza settlement.

The rewards were immediate. When the leaders sat down to dinner, Tokayev was the first of the five presidents Trump called on to speak — a distinction of protocol not lost on anyone in the room — and he used it to declare “the beginning of a new era of interaction” between the region and the United States. His flattery was, even by the standards of the evening, conspicuous — he told his host that Trump had been “sent by heaven” — but it was flattery in the service of a concrete agenda. Kazakh and American companies signed twenty-nine agreements worth roughly $17 billion, spanning locomotives, an AI data hub with Nvidia and the cloud firm Firebird, satellite internet with Amazon’s Leo constellation, and joint ventures in critical minerals.

The centerpiece was tungsten. Kazakhstan’s national mining company agreed with New York-based Cove Capital to jointly develop the Severny Katpar and Verkhnee Kairakty deposits in the Karaganda region — by some assessments the largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world — with American development-finance institutions signaling interest in more than a billion dollars of support. The deal has since acquired a political afterlife in Washington: subsequent reporting revealed that an investment vehicle backed by the president’s sons had taken a stake in the venture’s American parent shortly before the contract was awarded, and Democrats have promised congressional scrutiny. For Astana, the controversy is an American domestic affair — but a reminder that partnerships built close to this White House carry exposure to its politics.

Since November, the relationship has settled into an unusually productive rhythm: Gor in Astana in June for talks on investment, artificial intelligence, transport, and critical minerals; a senior U.S. Chamber of Commerce delegation received by Tokayev in early July; the C5+1 Critical Minerals Dialogue convening with high-level American participation; and now the July 10 call, in which both sides, notably, dwelt on results rather than rhetoric.

The Periodic Table Under Their Feet

What does Washington want? The short answer is minerals, and the shorter answer is China.

Beijing’s dominance of critical raw materials — including more than 80 percent of global tungsten supply, a near-monopoly on rare-earth processing — has become one of its sharpest instruments of leverage over the United States. China has repeatedly tightened export controls on rare earths and critical minerals. In early 2025, Beijing instituted strict export controls on tungsten, a commodity NATO lists among just twelve defense-critical raw materials. Finding alternative suppliers is no longer an industrial-policy preference in Washington; it is treated as a national-security requirement.

Kazakhstan is the most credible answer in Central Asia, and arguably one of the most credible anywhere. The country possesses deposits of 21 of the 50 minerals the United States classifies as critical. It is the world’s largest producer of uranium — an increasingly strategic commodity as the United States works to displace Russian nuclear fuel — and holds major deposits of chromium, copper, titanium, and tantalum. The Kuyrektykol discovery in the Karaganda region, announced in 2025, may hold rare-earth resources that would rank Kazakhstan behind only China and Brazil if confirmed. Kazakhs are fond of saying that the entire periodic table lies under their feet; the claim is only a mild exaggeration, and Washington has begun taking it literally.

The caveats are real. Reserves are not supply chains: Kazakhstan’s capacity to process tungsten and separate rare earths remains limited. Astana knows this, which is why its negotiating position has consistently emphasized processing, technology transfer, and higher value-added production over raw exports. For a country that has spent three decades exporting crude oil and importing refined goods, the American minerals push is an opportunity to industrialize, not merely to dig.

The minerals agenda also sits atop a much older economic foundation. More than 600 U.S. companies operate in Kazakhstan, and roughly 70 percent of all foreign direct investment in Central Asia flows to the country, by Tokayev’s own account. Chevron’s 1993 entry into the Tengiz field remains one of the most durable American investments anywhere in the former Soviet Union; the field’s $48.9 billion expansion reached full capacity last year, and Kazakhstan still accounts for roughly a quarter of Chevron’s global output. Whatever the oscillations of American policy over three decades, the companies stayed. That record is Kazakhstan’s silent advantage: it can show Washington not a pitch but a track record.

Astana's Calculus

For Kazakhstan, the logic of the American turn is written into the founding doctrine of its statehood: the multivector foreign policy, which holds that a vast, landlocked country wedged between Russia and China survives by ensuring it is never dependent on either.

The war in Ukraine has strained that doctrine from one direction. Russia remains an inescapable fact of geography — Kazakhstan shares with it the world’s longest continuous land border, a customs union, and a security treaty — but its capacity to underwrite the region’s economy has visibly diminished, and its willingness to respect the sovereignty of former Soviet neighbors is, after February 2022, an open question in Astana. China has filled much of the resulting vacuum, becoming the region’s dominant trading partner and infrastructure financier. Beijing is a valued partner, and relations are good. But substituting one overwhelming dependency for another is precisely the outcome multivectorism exists to prevent. An American vector — alongside European, Gulf, Korean, and Turkish ones — restores the equilibrium. As Nurlan Zhakupov, head of the sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna, put it: Kazakhstan assesses American, Chinese, Russian, or Emirati partners “on a relative performance basis,” and chooses what serves it best.

The Middle Corridor is where these interests converge rather than collide. The trans-Caspian route from China through Kazakhstan to the Caucasus and Europe offers Beijing a path to European markets, offers Washington access to Central Asian minerals without transiting Russia, Iran, or China, and offers Kazakhstan transit revenue and geoeconomic relevance. Traffic is growing fast — container trains through Kazakhstan were up over a third year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, and freight volumes have quintupled since 2019. It is a rare piece of infrastructure that Washington and Beijing can both endorse, which is exactly why Astana promotes it so energetically.

Thirty-Five Years of Cycles

The current moment is best measured against the history that preceded it — a history in which American attention surged, served some external purpose, and receded, and in which Central Asia was almost always a means to some other end.

Washington recognized Kazakhstan’s independence within days of the Soviet collapse in December 1991 — among the first capitals to do so — and the relationship’s founding chapter remains its most consequential. Kazakhstan emerged from the Soviet collapse holding the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal — more than 1,400 strategic warheads — along with the Semipalatinsk test site, where the Soviet Union had conducted 456 nuclear tests over four decades. President Nursultan Nazarbayev closed Semipalatinsk by decree on August 29, 1991, before the USSR had even formally dissolved, and then gave up the arsenal entirely, acceding to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and receiving security assurances under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

American partnership was woven through that choice. Under the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, Washington financed the dismantlement of weapons infrastructure. In November 1994, in a then-covert operation known as Project Sapphire, the two governments airlifted roughly 600 kilograms of poorly secured highly enriched uranium — enough for some twenty bombs — from the Ulba Metallurgical Plant to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Denuclearization also unlocked the Western capital Kazakhstan’s oil sector needed: Chevron’s Tengiz deal was signed in 1993, with ExxonMobil and others following into Kashagan and Karachaganak. That Tokayev used a call with Trump thirty years later to reaffirm nonproliferation principles was not boilerplate; it was an invocation of the relationship’s founding text.

The rest of the Nazarbayev-era relationship was warier. Through the 1990s, American engagement ran heavily through democracy promotion — NGOs, election monitoring, U.S.-funded media — and Washington’s assessments of Kazakhstan’s managed politics were a chronic irritant, even as energy cooperation deepened. After September 11, 2001, the region was recast in security terms: Kazakhstan’s neighbors hosted American bases, while Kazakhstan granted overflight and emergency landing rights and later became a link in the Northern Distribution Network supplying coalition forces in Afghanistan. The intervention next door served the region well: toppling the Taliban and crushing the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan eliminated the most pressing dangers, and the Western presence coincided with an unusual stretch of stability and growth.

But the pattern held: the region mattered to Washington as a staging ground, not a destination. The C5+1 format, created in 2015 at the foreign-minister level, was an attempt to institutionalize engagement as the security rationale faded. The chaotic withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021 delivered the sharper lesson — that Washington could walk away from a twenty-year commitment essentially overnight, leaving neighbors to manage the consequences.

The Biden years brought a genuine milestone — the first-ever presidential C5+1 summit, on the margins of the UN General Assembly in September 2023, where the Critical Minerals Dialogue was launched — but the underlying posture was cautious. Washington’s regional diplomacy after February 2022 was dominated by Ukraine, and Central Asia was approached substantially as a sanctions-compliance problem: a corridor through which dual-use goods might reach Russia, to be monitored and warned. The engagement laid groundwork, but it treated the region primarily as a risk to be managed.

What has changed under Trump is the frame. Human rights and governance have receded from the agenda — the administration dismantled USAID programming in Kazakhstan, and recent summits have been conspicuously free of the language of political reform. The loss of this dimension has led to the relationship now running on the terrain where Kazakhstan is strongest: resources, logistics, investment, and deals.

The shift runs deeper than tone. Under Trump, Washington has grown willing to look past traditional partners simply because they are traditional. The European Union — an ally by every treaty definition — is increasingly treated in Washington as a bloc that acts against American interests as often as with them. The partners gaining ground instead are those that bring something concrete to the table — capital, resources, military capability — and that read the world less through the lens of ideology than through prosperity and stability. Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, and Poland have all drawn markedly closer to Washington on precisely these terms. It amounts to a redefinition of what makes a country valuable to the United States, and it is a redefinition that plays directly to Central Asia’s strengths. The region’s states cannot offer democratic kinship; they can offer minerals, corridors, capital, and steadiness. For the first time, that is the currency Washington is counting.

The Tashkent Question

No account of Kazakhstan’s American ascent is complete without Uzbekistan, and no honest account renders the two as adversaries. The relationship is fraternal, dense, and increasingly institutionalized. But the two largest states of Central Asia do compete — for investment, for Washington’s attention, and, implicitly, for regional primacy — and the past year has clarified the terms of that competition.

Uzbekistan’s early lead was real. Mirziyoyev, not Tokayev, got the Oval Office meeting in September 2025; in November he arrived in Washington with a pledge that Uzbekistan would invest and purchase $35 billion in the American economy over three years and more than $100 billion over a decade. Tashkent’s pitch rests on genuine assets: the region’s largest population, approaching 38 million; a genuine post-2016 reform story; and an energetic courtship of Trump personally, including Mirziyoyev’s bid to host the next C5+1 summit in Samarkand, which would make Trump the first sitting American president ever to set foot in Central Asia. Tokayev has extended his own invitation, and the question of where Air Force One first lands in the region has become the unofficial scoreboard of the rivalry.

Yet as the relationship has moved from announcements to implementation, Kazakhstan’s structural advantages have told. Its mineral endowment is deeper and more aligned with specific American strategic needs — tungsten, uranium, rare earths — than Uzbekistan’s. It has Caspian ports and the Middle Corridor’s main line; Uzbekistan is doubly landlocked. Its accumulated American investment rests on three decades of contract performance, whereas independent economists have questioned whether Uzbekistan’s headline pledges are achievable on its current trajectory. Uzbek commitments lean heavily on purchases — aircraft, agricultural machinery, auto parts — while the Kazakh portfolio runs toward joint ventures, processing, and infrastructure that bind American capital into the country for decades. One relationship is being measured in orders; the other, increasingly, in assets.

It would nonetheless be a mistake — one Astana itself is careful not to make — to score this as a zero-sum contest. Every deepening of American engagement with any Central Asian state raises the strategic value of all of them: the Middle Corridor needs Uzbek cargo as well as Kazakh rail; the minerals story is regional, from Kazakh tungsten to Uzbek copper to Tajik antimony; and the five states have spent the years since 2018 building habits of consultation that make them more attractive to outside partners precisely because they increasingly act as a coherent region. Both presidents were invited to the Miami G20. The competition is real, but it is a competition to lead a rising bloc, not to escape a sinking one — and a Washington engaged with Tashkent is better for Astana than a Washington engaged with neither.

The Middle-Power Wager

Kazakhstan’s American opening is one panel of a larger design. Tokayev — a career diplomat, former director-general of the UN office in Geneva, and a Mandarin speaker — has articulated a vision of Kazakhstan as a middle power: a state that converts geography, resources, and diplomatic reliability into agency, rather than treating its position between giants as a condition to be endured. At the Antalya Diplomacy Forum this spring, he described middle powers as “bridges” capable of sustaining cooperation when great powers cannot or will not.

The record increasingly supports the ambition. Kazakhstan has hosted negotiation platforms from the Iran nuclear file to the Syria talks; it champions regional formats that give Central Asia a collective voice; and it has managed the near-impossible balancing act of the Ukraine war, maintaining its treaty relationship with Moscow while refusing to recognize the annexations and becoming a reliable alternative supplier to Western markets. Its nonproliferation biography gives it standing on nuclear questions that few states of any size possess — standing Tokayev deploys deliberately, as he did on the July call.

Regional leadership in Central Asia will never be a solo act; Uzbekistan’s demographic weight and Mirziyoyev’s diplomacy guarantee that. But political leadership — the capacity to convene, to mediate, to be the state outside powers call first — has been consolidating in Astana. The first word at the White House dinner on November 6 was one acknowledgment of that. The pattern of American engagement since has been another.

The Test Ahead

A measure of sobriety is warranted, and Kazakh officials privately supply it themselves. The history sketched above is a history of American attention arriving and departing on Washington’s schedule, and there is no guarantee this time is different. Headline deal figures often dwindle once engineers replace press officers. The tungsten controversy shows how a partnership tuned to this particular White House can become entangled in American domestic politics. Russia and China retain instruments of pressure that the United States cannot and will not neutralize; Washington is not about to become Central Asia’s security guarantor, and nobody in Astana pretends otherwise.

But the structural forces underneath the current warmth are more durable than the personalities atop it. American demand for non-Chinese critical minerals will outlast this administration. The Middle Corridor grows more valuable with every year the Russian route remains toxic. And Kazakhstan’s own strategy does not depend on American constancy — that is the entire point of multivectorism. The lesson of thirty-five years is that American companies proved more reliable partners than American administrations; Chevron outlasted six presidents. Kazakhstan’s achievement in the past year has been to convert a moment of geopolitical alignment into contracts, joint ventures, and institutions that can survive the moment’s passing.

Whether Trump lands first in Samarkand or on the steppe, the deeper shift has already occurred. A region long treated as a corridor to somewhere else is being engaged as a destination — and Kazakhstan, more than any of its neighbors, is the reason why.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an Expert at the N7 Foundation, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

When Donald Trump and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev got on the phone on July 10, their conversation ranged from the implementation of billions of dollars in commercial agreements to nuclear nonproliferation to an invitation for the American president to visit the Kazakh steppe. What was striking was not any single item but the routineness of the exchange. A US president and a Central Asian leader now talk the way close partners do—and that is new.

Consider the past eight months. Tokayev traveled to Washington in November for the first C5+1 summit ever held at the White House, where Trump announced Kazakhstan’s accession to the Abraham Accords—the initial addition of his second term. Companies from the two countries concluded 29 agreements valued around $17 billion. Trump has since extended G20 invitations to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for the Miami summit. A procession of senior Americans has passed through Astana this year, including Senator Steve Daines (R-MT), Special Envoy Sergio Gor, and a delegation from the US Chamber of Commerce. Cumulative American investment in Kazakhstan now exceeds $100 billion, and may rise to $137 billion in the medium term.

Read the full article on The National Interest.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Turan Research Center Director Joseph Epstein spoke with Kazakhstan's DKNews.kz about the country's newly enacted Constitution, which President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has framed as the start of a new historical era in Kazakhstan's statehood.

Epstein argued that the reform's most consequential element is the reintroduction of a vice presidency, which he read as a deliberate effort to build a transparent, institutionally anchored mechanism for the succession of power. For three decades, he noted, the core problem across Central Asia was never a shortage of strong leaders but the absence of predictable procedures for transferring authority — Islam Karimov left no clear succession plan and power changed hands behind closed doors, while Tajikistan and Uzbekistan largely resolved the question along dynastic lines. By writing a full succession mechanism into the Constitution, Kazakhstan is attempting something the region has scarcely seen, shifting the guarantor of stability from a single personality to a durable state institution. The real test, he emphasized, will be implementation rather than the text itself, but he called the ambition the right direction of travel.

On Tokayev's framing of the Constitution as the foundation of a "Just Kazakhstan," Epstein described the president's approach as evolutionary rather than abrupt, and said a constitution is one of the few instruments capable of preserving a chosen course beyond any single government or shift in public mood. Embedding the "Just Kazakhstan" concept directly in the Basic Law — rather than as a standalone state program — turns human-centered governance, the rule of law, and social-state principles into fundamental reference points that future governments would find far harder to abandon quietly. A document becomes truly strategic, he argued, precisely when it can constrain those who come after its authors, and that is the high bar Kazakhstan is now setting for itself.

Turning to investment and international standing, Epstein stressed that stability and predictability matter more to investors than almost anything else, and that this is where Kazakhstan holds a deliberately cultivated regional advantage. The "Law and Order" concept and the constitutional succession mechanism, he said, function partly as signals to the international investment community that the country's political and legal environment remains steady — a message that resonates given Kazakhstan's position as the world's largest uranium producer, a major center for critical minerals, and a key link in the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route connecting Europe and Asia while bypassing Russia and Iran. He was candid that reputations diverge by audience: investors and governments focused on reliability will read the changes positively, while parts of the Western expert community attentive to democratic procedure will likely criticize further concentration of executive power. Kazakhstan, in his view, is betting that predictability is now a more valuable resource than political uncertainty — a wager he considers reasonable in the current geopolitical climate.

Epstein also welcomed the Constitution's enshrining of long-term national values such as national unity and social accord, calling this especially relevant in an era of globalization where a state that fails to define its own values is shaped by external trends it cannot control. For a country home to more than a hundred nationalities, he said, that diversity can be either a source of friction or a strategic asset, and Kazakhstan has consistently chosen to treat its Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Turkic, and other communities as bridges to the wider world. He underscored the need for balance — Kazakhstan is the state of the Kazakh people, so strengthening Kazakh national culture is both natural and necessary, even as every citizen, whatever their origin, should feel fully part of the state and proud to call themselves Kazakhstani. Speaking personally, Epstein described Kazakhstan as a country he knows well through his own family, and called the combination of a strong Kazakh national foundation with genuine respect for all citizens one of the country's most underrated strengths.

Looking ahead, Epstein cautioned against expecting a sharp break, noting that constitutions rarely create a new political course and more often accelerate trends already underway. He expects continued momentum behind Kazakhstan's role as a key state of the Middle Corridor, further investment in mining, critical minerals, and transport-logistics infrastructure, and more stable conditions for long-term capital. Politically, he flagged the August elections to the Kurultai as the first serious test of the new legislative model and the eventual appointment of a vice president as a revealing indicator of how succession will be built — but identified 2029 as the decisive threshold. If the new constitutional model performs as hoped, he concluded, the coming years could lay the groundwork for what Central Asia has struggled for decades to achieve: a peaceful, predictable, and fully constitutional transfer of supreme state power.

Read the full interview at DKNews.kz (Russian).

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.

"[Israelis] have become a burden that humanity can no longer bear." That wasn't an Iranian ayatollah, a Hamas spokesman, or even a Columbia University professor. It was Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, representing NATO’s second-largest military, speaking on Turkish television last week. Israel's foreign minister called it textbook incitement to genocide. In the same interview, Fidan said Ankara has "no problem with confrontation if it comes to that."

This is no longer rhetoric without consequence. Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad, Turkish and Israeli forces have operated in close proximity in Syria—the two countries now effectively share a border there. In 2025, it was reported Turkish F-16s and Israeli aircraft came into direct contact in Syrian airspace during an Israeli strike, prompting urgent talks on a deconfliction mechanism, though Turkey denied this happened. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has called Zionism an existential threat to Turkey and asserted that Israeli operations in Syria and Lebanon endanger his country. His interior minister vowed last month that Turkey would one day retake Jerusalem.

Read the full article on Newsweek.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Iran’s leaders call survival a victory. After a year in which the United States and Israel dismantled the Islamic Republic’s military, gutted its nuclear program, and killed its supreme leader, the regime’s surviving officials insist that merely enduring is triumph enough.

But surviving is not the same as living, and what Tehran has preserved is a ruin. The tragedy, and the thing its rulers refuse to see, is that they had a choice and still do. A small nation on Iran’s northern border confronted a version of the same choice and answered it the opposite way. Armenia is the standing rebuttal to everything the Islamic Republic tells itself about why it cannot change.

Read the full article on the Washington Examiner.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

On June 7, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won the country’s parliamentary elections with just under 50 percent of the vote, enough under Armenia’s electoral system to govern alone with a comfortable majority. The nearest challenger, the Strong Armenia bloc fronted by Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, trailed near 23 percent, and every opposition force that cleared the threshold campaigned on some version of repairing ties with Moscow. Civil Contract cast the vote as a choice between a return to Russia’s orbit and a more independent Armenia drawn toward the West, and the electorate sided with the latter. Yet the win alone will not seal Armenia’s fate. The country must still pass the constitutional change widely seen as the final barrier to normalization with Azerbaijan and Turkey, and Pashinyan’s victory does not mean Russia will quietly concede a country it has dominated for two centuries.

Read the full article on the Central Asia Caucasus Institute.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Conventional wisdom holds that a country guards its independence by holding its ground, and that to surrender a claim to a part of its imagined territory, even one outside its control, is to surrender a part of its sovereignty. This attitude helps to explain the dozens of ongoing territorial disputes across the world—Venezuela’s desire for the Essequibo region of Guyana, dueling Indian and Pakistani claims to Kashmir, and the controversy around China’s “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea, among others—and why they are so intractable.

Armenia is no stranger to this view. For decades, it vigorously defended its claim to the Nagorno-Karabakhregion, an ethnic Armenian enclave within the internationally-recognized territory of Azerbaijan. Even after the enclave, known as the Republic of Artsakh, fell to an Azerbaijani offensive in 2023, Armenian politicians railed against Azerbaijan and vowed to liberate the territory from Baku’s control in a future conflict.

But this attitude has its limits. After Armenia lost the war, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan recognized that for Armenia—a small state wedged between far larger powers—an unwinnable claim could also become the mechanism by which his nation’s sovereignty was lost, and sought to win long-term peace in the south Caucasus by giving up Armenia’s claim to Nagorno-Karabakh. The deeper meaning of Pashinyan’s reelection on June 7 is a vote of confidence from the Armenian people in this approach—and a reward for Pashinyan’s remarkable personal courage in pursuing it.

Read the full article on The National Interest.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Uzbekistan's World Cup debut is no longer a prospect but a fact. In its first match at football's biggest tournament, it lost 3–1 to Colombia in Mexico City — a defeat, but not an empty one. Abbosbek Fayzullaev scored the country's first World Cup goal, briefly leveling the match before Colombia's experience told.

The road to that night ran through the 0–0 draw against the United Arab Emirates in June 2025, which secured direct qualification from Asia's final round and ended more than three decades of failed attempts since independence. But the result was never about one match, one coach or one golden generation. Uzbekistan did not suddenly discover football. It had talent, passionate crowds, clubs with history and youth teams with promise long before. What it lacked was a system strong enough to carry that talent to the world stage with any consistency.

That is the real significance of the breakthrough. The qualification is the headline; the system behind it is the story — Soviet inheritance, Pakhtakor's memory, the uneven institution-building of the post-independence years, opaque club financing, selection failures, prestige projects like Bunyodkor, and a recent push to make the game more organized, accountable and commercially viable. The achievement does not prove every problem is solved. It proves that football systems matter, and that Uzbekistan's has finally begun to deliver.

A Central Asian moment

The response was not confined to Uzbekistan. Across the region the qualification was treated as a shared achievement, with social media filling up with clips of fans from neighboring countries cheering the team, painting Uzbek flags on their faces and claiming it as Central Asia's own.

That enthusiasm was partly cultivated. According to information obtained by Turan Research Center from several sources familiar with the arrangements, Uzbek state-owned and private companies supported efforts to bring regional media figures and bloggers to the World Cup to cover the campaign for audiences at home. The sources said several Kyrgyz bloggers were offered such support, with some receiving free Uzbekistan Airways flights in exchange for promotional or media work. Turan could not independently verify every arrangement, but the pattern points to a deliberate effort to stage the debut as a regional event rather than a purely national one.

Central Asia usually reaches international audiences through energy, migration, Russia, China, security or borders. Football is a rarer kind of visibility, and the campaign to amplify it across the region was an exercise in soft power, not a spontaneous groundswell. A World Cup place puts Uzbekistan, and to some degree its neighbors, inside one of the few events watched by billions.

None of this makes Central Asia a single football culture. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan each have their own teams and rivalries. But the qualification crossed a line that had stayed shut since the Soviet collapse: a Central Asian side, for the first time, at the World Cup. Uzbekistan goes as a national team, and as the region's first football project to break through at this level.

Expansion helped — but Uzbekistan still earned it

The caveat is obvious: the 2026 World Cup grew to 48 teams, widening Asia's path. But that should not shrink the achievement to a technicality. Uzbekistan did not slip through a back door. It finished in the top two of its group and qualified directly, behind only Iran. Even under the format used for 2018 and 2022, the top two in each final group advanced automatically. The systems are not identical, so the comparison is imperfect, but the point holds: Uzbekistan earned a position that has long meant direct qualification. The expanded field opened the road; Uzbekistan still had to walk it.

The Soviet inheritance

Uzbek football did not start from a blank page in 1991. Much of what shaped the post-independence game was older than the state itself.

Soviet football was organized around institutions — ministries, industries, republics. CSKA was the army's club, Dynamo sides were tied to the security and police apparatus, Lokomotiv to the railways. Clubs were institutional flags as much as football teams, which made the game political from the start. Sport in the USSR was a demonstration of discipline, modernity and the prestige of the system. Moscow 24's history of the era describes how Dynamo grew out of a sports society linked to the security services, with branches in republican capitals, and how figures as powerful as Lavrentiy Beria attached themselves to football patronage and club rivalries.

For the republics, football also carried symbolic weight. Dynamo Kyiv, Dinamo Tbilisi, Ararat Yerevan, Neftchi Baku, Kairat Almaty and Pakhtakor Tashkent were not national teams, but they stood in for republican pride. A win over Moscow clubs, or a European run, could read as a statement about the republic itself — one of the few sanctioned ways for that pride to surface inside a Soviet frame.

Pakhtakor was Soviet Uzbekistan's football face in the Union. Its name — "cotton grower" — tied it to the republic's economic identity, and its stadium, colors and players became part of how the republic imagined itself in sport.

The inheritance cut both ways. It gave Uzbekistan football pride, stadium culture and a deep fan base, but it also entrenched patronage, institutional dependence and politicized sport, along with a familiar set of governance problems. Soviet football had its own history of informal deals, refereeing disputes and rigged results. Vedomosti, writing on the long campaign against draws, notes that by 1977 drawn matches had grown so common that officials publicly admitted hearing that some teams had stopped competing and were fixing outcomes by agreement; rather than address the cause, the authorities simply capped the number of permitted draws from 1978 to 1988. Sports.ru's archive of a 1982 coaching seminar shows discipline, refereeing, players' financial demands and match-fixing all discussed openly before the USSR ended, and another piece, drawing on coach German Zonin's recollections, describes fixing as a recurring problem alongside political pressure on individual results. These are historical testimony, not court records — but they show governance trouble was already baked into late Soviet football. It did not vanish in 1991; it was inherited, adapted and reproduced.

Pakhtakor and the memory of a lost generation

Pakhtakor remains the deepest symbol of that past. In August 1979, a plane carrying the team was destroyed in a mid-air collision over Soviet Ukraine, killing players and staff in one of the defining tragedies of Uzbek football. The damage outlasted the season. As the historian Ahror Safarov told Eurasianet, Uzbekistan lost not only great players but the coaches they would have become — a break in knowledge, mentorship and continuity that a still-consolidating football culture could ill afford.

Rumors and unofficial theories circulated afterward, as they did around many Soviet tragedies, but they do not displace the documented record. What endures is simpler: Pakhtakor became more than a club because it carried both the ambition of Soviet Uzbekistan and the grief of its loss. The patronage-and-prestige model it embodied proved just as durable after independence.

The post-independence system: ambition without stability

Independence did not cost Uzbek football its ambition. It had big clubs, loyal support, good players and several near-misses painful enough to sting. What it carried, like much of the former Soviet space, were structural weaknesses: club financing that leaned on patrons, state-linked sponsors or local authorities rather than commercial revenue; uneven governance; patchy youth development; and prestige projects that outran institution-building.

Bunyodkor was the clearest case. In the late 2000s it became one of Asia's most conspicuous football projects — bringing Rivaldo to Tashkent, hiring Zico and then Luiz Felipe Scolari, and drawing a level of attention almost no club in the region had managed. For a while it looked like modernization. But it also exposed the limit of the model: a club can buy stars; it cannot buy a sustainable ecosystem.

Foreign reporting tied Bunyodkor's rise to Zeromax, the opaque Swiss-registered conglomerate linked in several accounts to elite networks around Gulnara Karimova, who has consistently denied any connection to the company. The ownership and influence structures were hard to verify, which was part of the problem — the model ran on money and proximity to power rather than transparent football economics. When the structures around Zeromax collapsed, so did Bunyodkor's glamour, leaving unpaid-wage claims, legal disputes and debts from the Rivaldo and Denilson era; Rivaldo himself pursued millions in unpaid wages and fees, and the club was still working through the legacy years later.

Bunyodkor lifted Uzbekistan's profile and produced real players and memorable seasons. But it proved that prestige spending is not institution-building. The lasting question was never whether Tashkent could sign a famous player. It was whether the country could build clubs, academies and competitions that survived after the money and the political attention moved on.

Selection, trust and the talent Uzbekistan almost missed

A deeper problem has been selection — who gets seen, who gets promoted, who gets overlooked, and how far the system trusts its own judgment. Abdukodir Khusanov is the case in point. His move to Manchester City made him Uzbekistan's most visible export and gave the country a recognition it had never had in the Premier League era; for many abroad, he was the first Uzbek footballer they had heard of.

His route there was anything but smooth. Khusanov came through Bunyodkor's academy, but according to The Guardian, the club decided at 17 that he was not strong enough for the first-team path and offered him only a reserve place in the third division. He and his father looked elsewhere, which is how he reached Energetik-BGU in Belarus, then Lens, then City. This is not an indictment of one club — systems miss players everywhere — but it is a reminder that elite talent can slip through imperfect domestic filters. A player good enough for Manchester City had to leave through Belarus before anyone recognized his level.

That sets the real test for the system behind him: not whether it can produce one player good enough to be missed, but how many it can spot early, develop properly and keep visible without losing them abroad first.

Other failures have eroded trust. In 2016, Ozodlik reported the case of Ilyos Zeytullayev, who said his birth date had been altered when he was young and did not match his documents — and age manipulation distorts youth competition, undermines academies and makes merit-based selection harder to verify. More recent cases suggest the old habits persist but are handled differently now. In 2026, Uzbek media reported that the U-19 head coach at professional club Kyzylkumwas detained after allegedly demanding 20 million soms from a teenager born in 2008 for a place in the squad. The behavior was familiar; the public reporting and criminal handling were not. The same logic extends to match integrity, where Uzbekistan has introduced criminal liability for bribery and corruption involving participants and organizers of sports competitions. None of this means corruption has disappeared. It means fixing and sports bribery are now treated as legal and institutional threats rather than internal embarrassments.

The new generation

Khusanov is the most visible face of the new era, not the whole of it. This national team blends domestic football culture with serious professional exposure abroad. Eldor Shomurodov, Abbosbek Fayzullaev, Jaloliddin Masharipov, Otabek Shukurov and others have been shaped by foreign leagues and standards; FIFA listed Khusanov, Shomurodov and Fayzullaev among the headline names in the build-up, and Reuters cast Shomurodov and Khusanov as the squad's leading figures. Earlier Uzbek sides often had talent but lacked international rhythm. This generation has more players who know football outside the domestic system — Russia, Europe, Turkey, the Gulf — along with the dressing rooms, tactics and pressure that come with it.

The senior breakthrough rests on a deeper base. Uzbekistan won the AFC U-20 Asian Cup in 2023, reached the U-23 final and qualified for the Olympics for the first time in 2024, and took the U-17 Asian Cup in 2025. None of it guarantees lasting success, but it shows a pipeline broader than one golden generation. The World Cup will reshape the economics too: strong performances draw scouts and offers, and young players see a clearer route from local academies to foreign leagues. Khusanov proved the path exists. It is not yet systematic.

The reform turn: treating football as a system

The breakthrough follows a stretch of steadier state attention. Under Shavkat Mirziyoyev, football has been folded into the national development agenda rather than left as a scattering of clubs, and Reuters has tied the qualification to long-term investment in football schools, youth development, refurbished school grounds, mini-pitches and facilities. The official account goes further: in May 2026 Mirziyoyev said the country had expanded sports infrastructure, opened thousands of private clubs, built neighborhood grounds and launched schemes such as "Every mahalla — a football field," and that corruption and nepotism in football had been beaten. That is official narrative, not the full picture — independent assessments still treat corruption and nepotism as persistent features of Uzbek governance — but the underlying shift is real. Football now carries state-level priority, and that changes the environment players grow up in.

The same shift shows in financing, where the central contradiction of post-Soviet football has always been that clubs cannot become businesses while they survive on the expectation that a state company, governor or connected sponsor will cover the bills. Ozodlik reported in 2019 that the governor of Andijan levied what locals called a "football tax" on businesses and farmers to fund a local club. More recently, state companies have begun pulling out of non-core sponsorship — Uzbekneftegaz dropped Bunyodkor, Nasaf and Bukhara — while Super League clubs receive temporary state support that tapers from 35 billion soms per club in 2026 to 30 billion in 2027 and 25 billion in 2028, as the system moves toward private sponsorship and more independent management.

It is a real transition, if an incomplete one. Football is not commercially independent yet; the point is the direction — from obligation-based funding toward something more formal and eventually market-driven. A World Cup place can popularize the game but cannot make it profitable. Sustainability needs revenue from tickets, broadcasting, sponsorship, merchandise, academies and player sales; sponsors who see commercial value rather than political duty; and a domestic league fans trust enough to watch week to week. That is the next real test.

What comes after the breakthrough

Qualification does not close the story of Uzbek football; it opens the next chapter. The country has finally produced the result earlier generations chased and missed — the product of talent, a football-mad public, players seasoned abroad, sharper state attention and a genuine effort to confront old governance failures.

But the breakthrough sharpens a question it cannot answer by itself. A World Cup generates money, attention and political credit, and in Uzbek football those have historically flowed through patronage rather than institutions. The decisive test is not whether Uzbekistan can return to this stage, but whether the windfall is reinvested into academies, club finances and honest selection — or recaptured by the same logic that built Bunyodkor and then left it in debt. Khusanov had to be found in Belarus because the system nearly missed him at home. The breakthrough will have proven that system only when the next Khusanov no longer has to leave to be seen. Uzbekistan has reached the World Cup. Whether that becomes the foundation of a football economy, rather than the peak of another prestige cycle, is the question the celebration is postponing.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an Expert at the N7 Foundation, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

In a setback for Russia and a positive sign for America and the West, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyanwon a major victory in his country’s parliamentary elections on June 7. Civil Contract, Pashinyan’s political party, defied an all-out Russian influence effort and propaganda blitz, winning 64 out of the parliament’s 105 seats—an outright majority, allowing it to govern Armenia alone. But the act that will actually determine whether Armenia’s peace with Azerbaijan holds is not the election just behind him, but the constitutional change still ahead. Until Armenia removes the language in its 1995 post-Soviet constitution that lays implicit claim to the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, the deal initiated at the White House last August will remain a mere document, not a settlement. History offers a sharp warning about the difference. 

The clause in question sits in the preamble of Armenia’s constitution, which invokes the 1990 Declaration of Independence and, through it, the 1989 act of “reunification” with Nagorno-Karabakh. That language amounts to a standing claim on territory that every UN member state, now including Armenia itself, recognizes as Azerbaijani, and over which Baku reestablished full control in 2023.

Azerbaijan’s insistence that the provision be struck from the Armenian constitution is often framed in Yerevan as a humiliating demand imposed by the victor. It is better understood instead as the load-bearing element of the peace itself. So long as a state’s foundational text claims a neighbor’s internationally recognized land, the conflict cannot be considered closed; any agreement signed over that claim basically binds the leader who signed it rather than the nation itself, and it stays hostage to whoever governs next.

Read the full article on The National Interest.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Turan Research Center Director Joseph Epstein spoke with Kazakhstan's Arasha.kz about President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev's meeting with U.S. Special Envoy for South and Central Asia Sergio Gor, and what the encounter reveals about the deepening strategic partnership between Astana and Washington.

The conversation centered on the question of why Kazakhstan's significance to the United States is rising now. In Epstein's assessment, two factors stand out above the rest: critical minerals and transport connectivity, above all the Middle Corridor.

Over the past year, Beijing has repeatedly tightened export controls and demonstrated a willingness to leverage its dominance over rare earth and critical mineral supply chains as an instrument of pressure. That shift, Epstein argues, has turned what was once a long-term diversification goal for Washington into an urgent priority, and Kazakhstan holds the resources the United States now needs.

But extraction alone does not break the dependency. Today, much of Kazakhstan's mineral output is still shipped to China for processing and refining, which means the United States has not reduced its exposure so much as moved the chokepoint to another link in the chain. The real prize, Epstein notes, is whether Kazakhstan can develop its own processing and refining capacity beyond Beijing's control. That version of a knowledge economy is what would become genuinely attractive to American investors and development institutions, paired with a westbound route, the Middle Corridor, that bypasses both Russia and Iran.

The partnership also carries a political dimension. Tokayev was the first leader to join the Abraham Accords during President Trump's second term, and Astana's support for initiatives such as TRIPP and the Peace Council signals a willingness to be constructive on precisely the issues this administration prioritizes, building real goodwill in Washington. Epstein also points to Kazakhstan's longstanding role as a diplomatic convener, from the Astana process on Syria to its current positioning as a mediator and platform for dialogue, as an asset that will only grow more valuable as the international system fragments.

Read the full interview at Arasha.kz (Russian).

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

The deterioration of relations between Turkey and Israel following October 7 raised important questions about the potential consequences for relations between Ankara and Washington. Such concerns appeared justified. A Republican controlled Congress remained broadly skeptical of Turkey, influential members of the incoming administration were closely aligned with Israel, and Turkey's economic vulnerabilities seemed likely to provide President Donald Trump with leverage similar to that employed during his first term.

Contrary to these expectations, developments over the following eighteen months produced a different outcome. While relations between Turkey and Israel continued to worsen, with Ankara remaining one of Hamas's most vocal state supporters and intensifying its criticism of Israel, relations between Washington and Ankara improved significantly at the leadership level. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's September 2025 visit to the White House, his first in six years, generated progress on several longstanding disputes, including the F-35 program, CAATSA sanctions, and the Halkbank case, while also opening new avenues for cooperation in trade and civilian nuclear energy. President Trump's public characterization of Erdoğan as a "highly respected" and "tough" leader reflected the increasingly personal nature of bilateral ties.[1]

The 2026 Iran war brought this apparent contradiction into sharp focus. Despite declining to participate in the American campaign against Iran and instead positioning itself as a mediator, Turkey largely escaped the public criticism directed at several European allies for their reluctance to contribute. The episode demonstrated both the strategic importance Washington continues to assign to Turkey and the growing tensions inherent in a policy of accommodation toward Ankara.

Read the full article on the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Michael Rubin's case against Azerbaijan is a tidy one: Baku is spending billions on weapons, trades with Iran, and helps Russia evade sanctions — so it must be arming to invade Armenia, and waiving Section 907 only rewards a coming aggressor. It is a convincing argument, right up until you open a map.

Azerbaijan is the only country on earth that borders both Russia and Iran, wedged between two powers that have spent the past two years making plain what they think of its independence. A small state in that position does not get to "write off" its giant neighbors any more than Armenia, which trades with Iran far more dependently, gets to write off Tehran. Trade between neighbors is a fact of geography, not a declaration of loyalty. Far more revealing is the hostility both neighbors aim at Azerbaijan.

Start with Iran. Just this spring, Iranian drones struck the airport in Azerbaijan's exclave of Nakhchivan. Days earlier, Azerbaijani security services had rolled up an IRGC cell plotting attacks on critical infrastructure and Jewish targets. None of this was new: Iran has massed troops on the border, run large-scale drills aimed squarely at Baku, funded a terror proxy that seeks to overthrow the government, and threatened to turn the region into a "graveyard" for what its officials branded the “mercenaries of Donald Trump.” Those are not the gestures of a friendly trading partner.

Read the full article on The Washington Examiner.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

When Ukraine renames a city or tears down a Soviet-era monument, international media coverage tends to treat it as an understandable act of symbolic housekeeping by a nation at war. But this framing badly undersells what is actually happening.

Ukraine’s campaign to strip Soviet and Russian imperial place names from the country’s towns and cities is not a reaction to the current war so much as the leading edge of a region-wide rejection of Moscow’s cartography. From the Caucasus to Central Asia, former Soviet states are shedding the names and symbols imposed on them as they seek to assert their own national identities.

Ukraine’s decommunization and derussification drives began long before the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Initial renaming efforts started in the early 1990s, with streets across the country stripped of overtly Soviet names. This was accompanied by the removal of many but not all Communist monuments. Indeed, a giant Soviet hammer and sickle loomed over Independence Square in central Kyiv until the early 2000s.

A second major wave began in the wake of Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Two years later, the city of Dnipropetrovsk became Dnipro, shedding a name that honored Bolshevik functionary Grigory Petrovsky, a man associated with the machinery of Soviet rule during the artificial famine of the early 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians. Nearby Dniprodzerzhynsk reverted to its historic Kamianske, erasing the name of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police. Ordzhonikidze became Pokrov, dropping a Soviet revolutionary’s name entirely.

Read the full article on the Atlantic Council.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Israel’s defenders have warned for years that the United Nations, an institution that lectures democracies while shielding dictators, has been bent into a weapon against the Jewish state.

This week, the evidence hit — and it’s worse than even the cynics imagined.

It turns out that the United Nations and the global “human rights” apparatus writ large have been hijacked by bad actors intent on subverting the United States, its allies and the West as a whole.

And their antisemitism has been the pungent whiff of gas signaling a dangerous leak.

On Tuesday, the Geneva-based group UN Watch released “From Watchdogs to Ideologues,” a 104-page investigation into 13 of the UN’s 59 Special Rapporteurs — the supposedly independent human-rights monitors whose findings are routinely treated as authoritative by the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, Western governments and Western media.

The picture is damning.

Read the full article on The New York Post.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

For years before Russia invaded Ukraine, Western leaders reassured themselves that longtime Russian President Vladimir Putin was merely posturing. The consensus held that Russia’s all-out propaganda blitz—talking heads on state TV denying Ukrainian sovereignty, calls for referendums in the east, and warnings of Euro-Atlantic encroachment—was empty political posturing and was not meant literally. Even weeks before the invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, now rightly remembered as a stalwart hero of Ukraine’s defense, insisted that Russia’s threats to invade were mere rhetoric. Until they were not.

The same vocabulary is now being aimed at Armenia, and last week, Putin took it on himself. Days after Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan explicitly announced that Armenia was not Russia’s ally in the war on Ukraine, Putin warned that the country is “now living through everything that is happening on the Ukrainian track”—a path that began with Ukraine’s move toward the EU and ended in “the coup d’état, the Crimea story, the position of southeastern Ukraine, and military actions.” As an alternative, Putin proposed an overt referendum on whether Armenia should break with Russia, followed by “a soft, civilized, and mutually beneficial separation.”

Read the full article on The National Interest.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

The Departments of Justice, State, and Treasury have all confirmed they are investigating the money behind America’s loudest “pro-Palestinian” network — roughly $278 million funneled since 2017 by Neville Roy Singham, an American communist living in Shanghai, into groups including Code Pink. None of it is registered as foreign. That tells you what it actually is.

The loudest voices calling themselves “pro-Palestinian” in America aren’t pro-Palestinian. They’re anti-American.

Read the full article on The Washington Examiner.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

A major outcome of President Donald Trump's Beijing summit this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping had little to do with semiconductors or rare earths. According to the White House readout, Xi Jinping made clear China's opposition to any Iranian effort to militarize the Strait of Hormuz or charge a toll on its use. Beijing's own readout said nothing about Iran or the strait—and pointedly did not dispute the American account. That tacit acceptance exposed the so-called "axis" of China, Russia and Iran for what it actually is: a partnership of convenience that fractures the moment one partner's interests get in the way. 

The natural question is, what comes next? If Beijing can be pried loose from Tehran, can it be pried loose from Moscow, too? The answer requires understanding something Western policymakers have been slow to internalize: Russia already fears China far more than it lets on. 

Read the full article on Newsweek.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

When the heads of state of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) convene on May 15 in Turkistan under the theme "Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development," the central deliverable will be exactly what the title suggests: a coordinated push to build out Turkic cooperation around AI. The venue fits. Turkistan is the designated spiritual capital of the Turkic world, anchored by the mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasavi, the twelfth-century Sufi mystic whose influence is treated as a unifying thread running across the Turkic Muslim space from Anatolia to the Tien Shan. The political subtext sits beneath the symbolism. Turkic cooperation has reached unprecedented levels in recent years, and the OTS is increasingly being driven by three post-Soviet Turkic states — Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and, more cautiously, Uzbekistan — whose strategic orientations diverge from Ankara's. Turkistan will not resolve those tensions. It will instead showcase what the OTS can deliver when its drivers' interests align, and AI is the file where they align most cleanly.

The Center of Gravity Has Moved

The OTS was a Turkish-led project at its founding in 2009, but the initiative has migrated east. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev first proposed the structure in 2006, and the political energy now sits with the three Caspian-facing states. The shift has accelerated since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which bogged Moscow down in a war of attrition and opened space for its southern neighbors to maneuver. The Turkic states have used that space to deepen their own cooperation and to widen their options — toward the United States, the European Union, and one another.

Azerbaijan is the architect of the current phase. President Ilham Aliyev's government convened the first informal OTS summit in Shusha in July 2024, hosted the September 2024 Commission on the Common Turkic Alphabet that finalized a 34-letter Latin script, and chaired the 12th regular summit in Gabala in October 2025 under the theme "Regional Peace and Security." At Gabala, Aliyev declared that "it is very important for the Turkic States to act as a single power center" and framed military cooperation as essential to that vision. He has backed the framing with action — trilateral summits with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, an offer to quadruple Kazakh oil exports through Azerbaijani infrastructure at Russia's expense, and Azerbaijani participation in the multilateral Unity 2025 exercises in Samarkand alongside Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

Baku has also leaned into the historical narrative. The centenary of the First Turkological Congress, held in Baku in 1926, falls in 2026, and Azerbaijan is positioning the anniversary as the intellectual prehistory of OTS integration. The framing has substance behind it: Azerbaijan was the first post-Soviet Turkic state to complete the Latin script transition, and Baku is treating that experience as a template the rest of the region is now following. Combined with the Middle Corridor file — where Azerbaijan is the indispensable transit node — Baku has effectively claimed both the symbolic and the operational center of the project.

Azerbaijan has paired the political role with a serious AI build-out. Aliyev approved an Artificial Intelligence Strategy for 2025–2028 structured around five pillars — regulation, talent, data infrastructure, research, and international cooperation — and the country has climbed to 70th place in international AI readiness rankings, the leading position in the South Caucasus. The AI Academy launched in Baku in September 2025 is targeting 3,000 specialists and 500 government employees for fully funded training. A prototype Azerbaijani large language model trained on roughly 10 billion tokens was presented in 2025. The country's standardization body, the TK-05 committee, has adopted eight international AI standards as national standards, and pilot deployments are running in document processing, legal services, smart-grid optimization in the energy sector, healthcare, and agriculture. The strategy explicitly frames Azerbaijan's role as a regional AI leader, and the proposal floated by Baku for a common Turkic AI institute follows directly from that posture.

Kazakhstan's Moment

Hosting in Turkistan is the public marker of Kazakhstan's claim to co-leadership. Tokayev's administration has moved aggressively on three fronts that will be on display this week.

On AI, Kazakhstan now has the most developed sovereign stack in the region. The Alem.ai International Center, announced by Tokayev in 2024 and now operational in Astana, anchors a broader ecosystem that includes the Alem.cloud and AlFarabium-2 supercomputers (roughly 3.6 exaflops combined, with up to two exaflops of FP8 performance on advanced GPUs), the sovereign KazLLM and Alem LLM models, and the Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence at Nazarbayev University, which developed KazLLM and provides the country's independent research anchor. The institutional layer is equally dense: a dedicated Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development established in 2025, a Concept for AI Development for 2024–2029, and the first comprehensive AI law in Central Asia (Law No. 230-VIII, signed November 17, 2025 and in force since January 18, 2026). The law is risk-based, classifying systems as minimal, medium, or high risk and increasing regulatory obligations with potential harm. It bans manipulative AI, constrains social scoring and emotion recognition, requires labeling of AI-generated content with both user-visible warnings and machine-readable markers, and clarifies that fully AI-generated works do not qualify for copyright protection while preserving protection where meaningful human creative input is present. The Samruk-Kazyna sovereign wealth fund has installed an AI system, SKAI, with voting rights on its board — a governance experiment without precedent in the region. The country's headline human-capital target is one million people trained in AI-related skills by 2030. Tokayev is expected to pitch this ecosystem as the natural backbone of any pan-Turkic AI institute that emerges from Turkistan.

On strategic alignment, Kazakhstan formally announced its accession to the Abraham Accords in late 2025, becoming the first post-Soviet state and the first Central Asian country to join. Astana has recognized Israel since 1992 and some labeled the move as merely symbolic, but it was a deliberate signal of orientation. It was paired with a critical minerals deal with the United States and, in the months that followed, an Israeli presidential visit that included a stop at Alem.ai.

On security, Kazakhstan remains in the Collective Security Treaty Organization with Russia, but Astana is widening its options. Kazakh military cooperation with Turkey and Azerbaijan has expanded steadily, and Kazakh personnel are again participating in Exercise Regional Cooperation 2026, the thirtieth iteration of CENTCOM's annual exercise with Central and South Asian partners, hosted in the United States in June. The exercise draws from nearly a dozen countries and provides a quiet but consistent channel of US-Central Asian military familiarity that sits parallel to anything the OTS itself can offer. As Carnegie analyst Temur Umarov has observed, "only Washington can serve as a sufficient counterweight to both Moscow and Beijing" — and Astana, like Baku, is acting on that logic.

Uzbekistan's Slower Climb

Mirziyoyev has used the post-Karimov decade to remake Uzbekistan's regional role. Tashkent under Islam Karimov had withdrawn from Turkic cooperation, fearing that pan-Turkic sentiment might undermine his domestic authority; Mirziyoyev reversed course, helping facilitate regional intergration by normalizing long-standing border disputes with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and mediated successfully where Russia had previously been the only credible broker. The result is a Uzbekistan that now operates as a regional player rather than a regional spoiler. At Gabala, Mirziyoyev proposed regular joint meetings of OTS foreign ministers and intelligence chiefs and called for a development strategy through 2030 anchored in AI and the digital economy. During the height of last year's Russia-Azerbaijan rift, he told Aliyev that "never in history have our relations been at such a high level as today" — a public marker of Tashkent's choice.

Tashkent is not yet at the level of Baku or Astana in driving the OTS agenda, and its AI ecosystem remains early-stage. Its position as the most populous OTS member gives it weight that Mirziyoyev's diplomacy is steadily converting into influence.

The Turkey Question

Turkey is the largest and most militarily capable OTS member, and Ankara's defense industry remains the natural partner for any deeper Turkic military integration. But the three drivers diverge from Turkey on three issues that have hardened over the past two years.

The first is Northern Cyprus. Ankara secured observer status for the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 2022, but Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan reaffirmed UN Security Council Resolutions 541 and 550 — which declare the TRNC's secession legally invalid — in the joint EU-Central Asia declaration in Samarkand in April 2025. Turkish nationalist politicians publicly accused the three of betraying Turkic solidarity. The Gabala declaration papered over the rift, but the underlying calculation in Astana, Tashkent, and Ashgabat has not changed: relations with the European Union and the principle of territorial integrity outweigh any obligation to recognize the TRNC.

The second is Israel. Azerbaijan's long-standing security, economic, and intelligence partnerships with Israel are structural and broad, not transactional, and Baku has only increased relations with Jerusalem in recent years, despite Turkish pressure. Meanwhile, Kazakhstan's Abraham Accords accession has affirmed Astana’s strategic orientation toward a moderate coalition of Middle Eastern powers also including the UAE, that Turkey increasingly views as adversarial. Ankara has used OTS summits in the past to criticize Israel, and any move in that direction at Turkistan would create discomfort precisely as Turkic governments are moving closer to Jerusalem.

The third is the broader strategic compass. For Ankara, the post-Soviet Turkic space sits beside — not above — its priorities in the eastern Mediterranean, the Arab world, and an increasingly autonomous foreign policy that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's coalition partner Devlet Bahceli has openly framed as a Turkey-China-Russia alignment. For Baku, Astana, and Tashkent, the strategic compass points increasingly toward the United States, the EU, and the Middle Corridor — and away from Russia and Iran (although not China).

AI as the Flagship File

AI is where the drivers' interests converge most cleanly, which is why it is the theme of the summit. Two ideas are likely to dominate the conversation in Turkistan, and both follow logically from the ecosystems Baku and Astana have built.

The first is a common Turkic AI institute, originally floated by Baku, that would coordinate research, education, and compute infrastructure across member states. The institutional case is straightforward. Kazakhstan brings compute capacity at scale, a regulatory framework that is now in force, a research anchor at ISSAI, an applied-research front door at Alem.ai, and a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence with explicit authority to coordinate. Azerbaijan brings a national strategy organized around the same five domains that any cross-border institute would need to cover, an AI Academy that is already operational and could serve as a regional training hub, a national standards body that has begun aligning with international norms, and the political initiative for the institute itself. Turkey brings scale and a private-sector technology base; at Gabala, Erdogan called for accelerated development of a Turkish large language model "to catch up with global developments in artificial intelligence and to preserve our cultural richness." Uzbekistan, which has placed AI at the center of its proposed 2030 development strategy, would benefit disproportionately from compute access and shared training resources.

The second is the link between the common alphabet and shared linguistic data for sovereign AI. Sovereign Turkic language models — KazLLM and Alem LLM in Kazakhstan, the 10-billion-token Azerbaijani prototype presented in 2025, and the Turkish LLM Erdogan called for at Gabala — currently train on national corpora in different scripts and orthographies, which limits the value of pooling data across borders. Convergence on the 34-letter Latin alphabet finalized in Baku in September 2024 would, over time, make shared training data, shared evaluation benchmarks, and shared safety standards possible. The first book printed in the common alphabet was presented to leaders at Gabala. Turkistan is the logical next step, where alphabet, language data, computing, and regulation can be framed as parts of a single integration agenda.

Concrete deliverables to watch for: a framework decision on a common AI institute, including its location and governance; a coordinated approach to compute access for smaller OTS members; movement toward common standards for AI-generated content labeling, building on the Azerbaijani standards work and Kazakhstan's labeling regime; and language on data governance that aligns at least partially with Kazakhstan's new AI law. None of these is transformative on its own. Taken together, they would mark the OTS's most substantive move yet into a flagship technical domain, and would give the organization something more durable than declarations to point to.

The Military File

The Gabala summit left two questions open. AI is the easier one. The harder one is military cooperation. Aliyev's invitation at Gabala for member states to hold the first joint OTS military exercise in Azerbaijan in 2026 has not yet materialized into a fixed date, format, or participation list, although Turkic forces have already trained together in non-OTS formats — most recently in the Unity 2025 exercises in Samarkand. The July 2025 meeting of Turkic defense industry heads in Istanbul produced an understanding that Azerbaijan would host a second iteration in 2026, and the Gabala declaration referenced a draft "Treaty on Strategic Partnership, Eternal Friendship and Brotherhood of Turkic States." But CSTO membership for Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan's constitutional neutrality, and the parallel pull of CENTCOM exercises mean that any OTS military framework will remain considerably less than a mutual defense pact. Turkistan is more likely to produce procedural decisions than a breakthrough.

Conclusion

The strategic divergences inside the OTS — over Cyprus, Israel, and the alignment of the Turkic world with the West — are real, and the summit will leave them where it found them. That is the point. What Turkistan can do is show that the OTS is now capable of substantive cooperation in the areas where its drivers agree. AI is that area, and the drivers setting the pace are Baku and Astana.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an Expert at the N7 Foundation, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Two of the Kremlin's top propagandists are openly calling for war against Armenia.

On Sunday, Margarita Simonyan—head of Russian state-funded broadcaster RT—reacted to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's appearance at a European summit in Yerevan by declaring it was "time to think about protecting the Russian population and our interests in that country." "Protecting the Russian population" is the exact justification President Vladimir Putin used for the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Solovyov, Russia's highest-rated television anchor, has gone further still, calling on air for a "special military operation" against Armenia.

This is the soundtrack to a Kremlin campaign that began the moment Yerevan turned west—and it is now reaching its decisive moment. On June 7, Armenia votes. The parliamentary election is a referendum on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and, more consequentially, on whether his country continues toward the West and peace, or returns to managed conflict under Russian dominion. Washington has weeks, not months, to make sure it ends the right way.

Read the full article on Newsweek.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Turan Research Center Director Joseph Epstein was quoted in Independent Arabia's analysis of the stalled U.S.–Iran negotiation track, alongside Crisis Group's Joost Hiltermann and other regional analysts. Epstein argued that Tehran is recycling the strategy it deployed under Obama and Biden — betting that Washington fears deeper entanglement and that President Trump will not risk higher gas prices before the midterms. He noted that while the Iranian regime markets itself as immune to economic pain through revolutionary will, "ideology doesn't pay the salaries of the bureaucrats who actually keep the state running."

Epstein assessed that Washington sees time on its side: a few more weeks of naval blockade pressure may force Iran to shut in wells, permanently degrading its oil revenue base. He characterized Tehran's negotiating posture as "essentially nostalgia" — an attempt to recreate the dynamics that produced the JCPOA in 2015 on the assumption that Trump shares his predecessors' appetite for a deal at any cost. That assumption, Epstein argued, misreads the moment: Trump has drawn clear red lines on the nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and proxy networks, and a political optic of "losing to Tehran" would be untenable for him. The decisive variable, in Epstein's reading, is not the calendar but the collapse of Iranian oil revenues — leverage Tehran cannot match.
Read the full article on the Independent (Arabic).

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Tucker Carlson is “tormented.”

Not by a policy failure, not by a domestic crisis — by the fact, he said this week, that President Donald Trump backed Israel in a war against Iran.

It’s in line with a grievance the podcaster and former Fox News host has nursed for months.

He’s told his followers that Israel is “a completely insignificant country” with “no resources.”

America gets “nothing” from the relationship, he’s said, repeating a theme that echoes throughout the right-wing influencer world.

Theo Von, the third-biggest podcaster on Spotify, declared on his show: “All of our f—ing money goes to Israel.”

Candace Owens turned such complaints into her brand’s growth engine.

Influencers are political adolescents — especially in this era of grift, when an emotional statement on a visceral topic can achieve instant fame.

But to be fair to Von and those who rightfully question US foreign aid, the idea of giving $3.8 billion a year to a country of 10 million on the other side of the world while Americans struggle at home is genuinely puzzling.

It deserves a real answer.

Read the full article on the New York Post.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.

The war with Iran has consumed Washington’s bandwidth for the last month and a half. But the conflict has distracted from more than Ukraine. In the South Caucasus, Russian President Vladimir Putin is waging a quiet campaign to reverse one of the Trump administration’s signature foreign policy achievements—the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal—and doing so on the cheap.

The centerpiece of that deal is the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). This transit corridor would link Azerbaijan to its exclave, Nakhchivan, through Armenian territory and open a land bridge from Central Asia to global markets, bypassing both Russia and Iran. TRIPP is more than infrastructure. It is America’s foothold in the South Caucasus and the key to unlocking Central Asia’s vast rare-earth reserves—resources essential for smartphones, electric vehicles, and advanced weapons systems—at a moment when the United States relies on China for roughly 70 percent of those critical imports.

Armenia holds parliamentary elections on June 7. The vote is a referendum not just on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government but on the country’s geopolitical orientation—West or Russia, peace or managed conflict. If TRIPP becomes reality, Russia loses its chokehold on Caucasus trade routes and its leverage over two former colonies.

Read the full article on The National Interest.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.

For years, proponents of the Middle Corridor argued that any transit architecture dependent on Russian or Iranian territory was one crisis away from collapse.

They were right.

The Strait of Hormuz remains closed—first by Iranian blockade, now by American policy—taking roughly 20 percent of global petroleum transit offline. Southern routes through Iran that Central Asian states had been building as alternatives to Russian infrastructure are worthless. The only east-west corridor that bypasses both is the Middle Corridor, running through the South Caucasus. Iran grasped this before Congress did: On March 5, its drones struck Azerbaijan's Nakhchivan airport, targeting the precise route where the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity— TRIPP—is planned.

Read the full article on Newsweek.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

As Armenia approaches its June 7, 2026, parliamentary elections, Russia has launched a multi-front campaign to reverse Yerevan's Western pivot and destroy the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), the transit corridor at the heart of the U.S.-brokered Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal. Moscow is deploying the full spectrum of hybrid warfare — direct political pressure, economic coercion, disinformation, institutional subversion through the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the mobilization of both domestic and diaspora opposition. The campaign mirrors tactics Russia has used in Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, and across Central Asia, but the stakes in Armenia are uniquely high: the outcome of the June vote will determine whether the South Caucasus integrates into the Western-aligned Middle Corridor or reverts to Russian-managed frozen conflict. Washington has a narrow window to act.

Introduction: The Iran War as a Smokescreen

The ongoing U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran has dominated Washington's foreign policy bandwidth since its escalation in early 2026. The conflict's consequences — disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the destruction of Iran's Ras Laffan-area strike capabilities, the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, and the broader realignment of Gulf security — have rightly commanded attention. But the Iran war has also created a permissive environment for Russian adventurism in theaters Washington is not watching.

The South Caucasus is chief among them. While American policymakers focused on Tehran, Vladimir Putin moved to exploit the distraction, escalating pressure on Armenia in ways that threaten not only the peace process with Azerbaijan but American strategic interests across Central Asia. The June 7 elections represent a critical inflection point. If Moscow succeeds in installing a compliant government in Yerevan, it will unravel the single most consequential American diplomatic achievement in the region.

TRIPP and the Geopolitical Stakes

To understand why Russia is investing so heavily in Armenia's elections, one must start with TRIPP. The Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, initialed by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan at the White House on August 8, 2025, envisions a twenty-five-mile corridor linking Azerbaijan to its exclave Nakhchivan through Armenian territory. On its own, this is a modest piece of infrastructure. In context, it is transformational.

TRIPP is the missing link in the Middle Corridor — the trans-Caspian trade route connecting Central Asia and China to European and global markets while bypassing both Russia and Iran. Currently, the Middle Corridor runs through Georgia, but this route carries two serious vulnerabilities. First, the East-West Highway that carries most overland freight and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline that carries most of the region's energy exports both pass within one and 42 kilometers, respectively, of Russian-backed separatist forces in South Ossetia — close enough that BP briefly shut the pipeline during Russia's 2008 invasion. Second, the Georgian government under Georgian Dream has largely abandoned Euro-Atlantic integration and moved closer to Russia, China, and Iran, making the corridor's long-term reliability through Georgia increasingly uncertain. TRIPP offers a southern alternative that would reduce dependence on a single, increasingly compromised transit state.

Central Asia holds vast reserves of rare-earth elements and critical minerals essential to modern technology, from semiconductors to electric vehicles to advanced weapons systems. The United States currently relies on China for roughly 70 percent of its rare-earth imports. Diversifying those supply chains through Central Asian sources requires transit infrastructure that does not pass through Russian or Iranian territory. TRIPP, combined with expanded road and rail links through Armenia to Azerbaijan and Turkey, provides exactly that.

For Russia, this represents an existential threat to its remaining leverage in the post-Soviet space. For three decades, Moscow exploited the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict as a tool of domination, playing both sides to maintain dependence. It sold weapons to both countries, acted as Armenia's nominal security guarantor through the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and used the frozen conflict as justification for its military presence and political influence across the region. A genuine peace between Yerevan and Baku — formalized through American mediation, no less — strips Moscow of this leverage entirely.

Direct Political Pressure: The April 1 Kremlin Meeting

The most visible dimension of Russia's campaign is the direct political pressure Putin himself has applied to Pashinyan. The two leaders' April 1, 2026, meeting in Moscow was remarkable for its open hostility, barely concealed behind diplomatic pleasantries.

Putin used the meeting to make several pointed demands. He called for dual Russian-Armenian citizens to be permitted to run in the June elections — a transparent reference to Samvel Karapetyan, the Russia-based billionaire founder of the "Strong Armenia" party, currently under house arrest in Yerevan on money laundering charges and allegations of plotting a coup. Putin stated that Russia would like "all" such individuals "to be able, at the very least, to participate in this domestic political process." He added, with undisguised menace, that Russia has "many friends in Armenia — many."

Putin also told Pashinyan flatly that simultaneous Armenian membership in the European Union and the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) is "simply untenable" — a direct challenge to Yerevan's stated policy of pursuing EU integration while maintaining EAEU membership.

Pashinyan pushed back with unusual directness, telling Putin that "only citizens holding an Armenian passport — and no other nationality — can run in these elections." He underscored Armenia's democratic character, noting pointedly that "our social media, for example, is 100 percent free. There are no restrictions at all." He also confronted Putin over Russia's failure to fulfill its CSTO obligations during the Second Karabakh War, stating that Armenia "still has no explanation to offer to our people as to why the CSTO failed to respond."

The Kremlin's reaction was swift and characteristically threatening. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared that Moscow "reserves the right" to discuss Armenia's elections and its future orientation. Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk warned that Armenia is approaching a "point of no return" and threatened to restructure economic relations. In a detailed TASS interview, Overchuk went further, criticizing Armenia's plans for TRIPP — which he referred to as the "Trump Route" — characterizing it from Washington's perspective as "an international transport corridor ensuring the export of critical minerals from Central Asia to the United States, as well as control over Iran's northern border." He insisted that only Russia's participation in regional unblocking could "ensure the necessary balance of interests."

The message from Moscow was unambiguous: Armenia's democratic choice is subject to Russian approval, and the wrong choice will carry consequences.

Economic Coercion: The Tightening Vise

Russia has moved beyond threats to action. The economic pressure campaign against Armenia has escalated steadily since Yerevan froze its CSTO participation and began pursuing deeper ties with the West.

The instruments are familiar from Russia's playbook in other post-Soviet states. Armenian dairy products faced a sweeping import ban in 2023. Broader agricultural restrictions followed in 2024. In 2025, Russia delivered a crippling blow to Armenia's flower export industry. Moscow has also withheld millions in prepaid arms deliveries — weapons Armenia had already purchased but never received.

More recently, Moscow has reportedly moved to ban enterprises, companies, and cultural organizations linked to the Pashinyan government from operating in Russia. Reports have surfaced of the Proshyan Cognac Factory's export license to Russia being suspended. Even Armenia's ambassador to Russia and his circle have reportedly been placed in a "persona non grata" status.

These measures are designed to create tangible economic pain that ordinary Armenians will associate with the Pashinyan government's Western orientation. Armenian Speaker of Parliament Alen Simonyan acknowledged the dynamic when he stated that Armenia would exit both the CSTO and EAEU if Russia raised gas prices — while expressing confidence that it would not come to that.

Karapetyan, from house arrest, has amplified the economic pressure narrative, warning Armenians that the current government has turned the country into "an arena of geopolitical confrontation" and that continued support for Pashinyan will bring "poverty and enmity with Russia, polarization and economic collapse." His messaging closely mirrors Kremlin talking points, promising that "Strong Armenia" will "befriend all countries" — code for restoring Armenia's position within Russia's orbit.

Information Warfare and the Disinformation Surge

The most potent and least visible dimension of Russia's campaign is information warfare. Since late 2025, Russian-aligned disinformation targeting Armenia has surged dramatically. According to CivilNetCheck, a local fact-checking organization, fake news targeting Armenian authorities spiked sharply in the months leading up to the election. The operations follow a well-established Russian playbook deployed previously in Moldova, Romania, France, Germany, and the United States.

The infrastructure of the campaign includes cloned foreign websites designed to mimic legitimate media outlets, coordinated amplification through anonymous social media accounts, and Russian-language Telegram channels that serve as primary distribution networks. The content is carefully tailored to exploit Armenia's specific political vulnerabilities.

Several narrative threads are particularly prominent. First, allegations that Pashinyan's government has made secret territorial concessions to Azerbaijan, designed to stoke nationalist anger. Second, claims that Western countries are conducting dangerous medical experiments on Armenian women and children, or that French companies are burying nuclear waste in Armenian national parks — fabrications designed to discredit Western partnership. Third, and most strategically significant, narratives that amplify friction between the government and the Armenian Apostolic Church.

The Armenian Apostolic Church as an Institutional Lever

The weaponization of the Armenian Apostolic Church represents perhaps the most sophisticated element of Russia's hybrid campaign — and it draws on a deep institutional history. Throughout the Soviet period and into the post-Soviet era, Moscow cultivated influence over religious institutions across its periphery, using them as instruments of political control, intelligence collection, and social mobilization. The Russian Orthodox Church's role as an arm of Kremlin policy is well documented, but Moscow's reach extended to other confessions as well, including the Armenian Apostolic Church.

At the center of the current crisis is Catholicos Karekin II, the Supreme Patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic Church since 1999. Karekin II studied at the Russian Orthodox Academy in Zagorsk and was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship by Putin. His brother, Archbishop Yezras Nersisyan, serves as the Primate of the Armenian Church's Diocese of Russia and New Nakhijevan — appointed to the Moscow post by Karekin II himself in 2004. According to declassified documents from the Armenian National Security Service provided to Armenian media in late 2025, Archbishop Yezras was recruited by the Soviet KGB and cooperated with the agency from 1986 to 1988. The Vice Speaker of Armenia's Parliament, Ruben Rubinyan, described Yezras as a "KGB agent" and accused Karekin II of "using his agent brother to invite foreign churches to interfere in the affairs of our centuries-old independent and autonomous Church."

Amid the government-church confrontation, Putin awarded Nersisyan a state honor in November 2025 — a gesture widely interpreted as a signal of Russian backing. Nersisyan has since escalated dramatically. In an interview with the Russian state-run outlet TASS, he threatened any Armenian judge who might sentence Karekin II — who has been under criminal investigation since February 2026 for obstructing a court ruling — with excommunication. "This person will be excommunicated, and the people will curse his entire family," Nersisyan told TASS. He went further, claiming that a "coup d'état" had taken place in Armenia and that the authorities were using administrative resources "to discredit the clergy for political purposes, inciting intolerance toward the Church in society." That the head of the Armenian Church's Russian diocese is issuing threats against Armenian judicial officials from Moscow, through Russian state media, while under investigation for KGB ties, illustrates the degree to which the church has become a direct extension of Russian influence operations.

The confrontation has deep roots. Following Armenia's defeat in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, Karekin II repeatedly called on Pashinyan to resign. In spring 2024, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, a senior cleric, led the largest anti-government protests and positioned himself as a candidate for prime minister. Armenian authorities have since barred Karekin II from leaving the country, and multiple high-ranking priests have been arrested on various charges — actions the church describes as political persecution.

The Russian Orthodox Church has openly taken sides. In January 2026, Metropolitan Anthony of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations, met with Archbishop Yezras at the Moscow Armenian Church. The Russian Orthodox Church subsequently accused the Armenian government of "engineering a schism" within the Armenian Church — an extraordinary intervention by a foreign religious institution into Armenia's internal affairs, and one that aligned precisely with the Kremlin's political objectives.

Church leaders who have turned against the Pashinyan government provide Moscow with an institutional lever within Armenian civil society that operates independently of direct Russian state control. The pattern mirrors Russia's use of the Moscow-aligned branch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the years before the 2022 invasion. In Ukraine, the church served as a vehicle for pro-Russian sentiment, an intelligence collection platform, and a source of institutional legitimacy for narratives that undermined the government's sovereignty and Western orientation. Ukrainian journalist Oleksii Platonov described these clerics as the "Kremlin's agents in robes."

In Armenia, the church confrontation reached a dramatic peak on Palm Sunday 2026, when a church service led to a public confrontation as a congregant attempted to strike Pashinyan. The church has become a rallying point for opposition forces that frame the election as a civilizational choice between Armenia's Christian identity (implicitly aligned with Russia) and secular Western integration.

The church dynamic is particularly dangerous because it operates at the level of identity rather than policy. Economic coercion can be countered with alternative trade relationships. Disinformation can be debunked. But when a nation's oldest institution positions itself as the guardian of identity against a government it characterizes as selling out to foreign powers, the political effect is far more durable and difficult to combat.

Western Amplifiers: ANCA, Amsterdam, and Carlson

Moscow does not operate in isolation. The Kremlin's core narratives — that Pashinyan is a traitor, that peace with Azerbaijan means capitulation, that TRIPP is a vehicle for foreign exploitation — find ready amplifiers among actors in the West who, for their own reasons, oppose the peace process. The strategy of targeting U.S. domestic opinion to erode support for a foreign partner is not new. Russia deployed the same approach against Ukraine, using sympathetic media figures and lobbying networks to undermine Congressional support for Kyiv. A similar playbook has been directed at Israel, with narratives designed to fracture the bipartisan consensus on U.S. security partnerships. In Armenia, the operation is smaller in scale but involves some of the same actors — and the same objective: convincing Americans that supporting a democratic ally is not worth the cost.

The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), Washington's most prominent Armenian diaspora lobby, has long opposed normalization with Azerbaijan and routinely echoes the same grievances that Russian disinformation exploits. ANCA's leadership has gone further, denouncing TRIPP as a "neo-colonial U.S.-backed corporate consortium" — language that positions America's signature regional initiative as a predatory enterprise rather than a pathway to peace and prosperity. Whether or not ANCA coordinates with Moscow is beside the point. The functional effect is identical: undermining American policy and reinforcing the Kremlin's narrative that Western engagement is a trap.

Karapetyan has retained the lobbyist Robert Amsterdam, whose professional history raises questions that deserve scrutiny. Amsterdam's previous client was Vadim Novinsky, а pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarch with ties to the Moscow-aligned faction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Amsterdam's involvement suggests a professionalized influence pipeline connecting Russian-aligned interests across the post-Soviet space to Washington's lobbying ecosystem.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson — who has a well-documented record of amplifying Kremlin, Chinese, and Iranian narratives, and who has been instrumental in efforts to undermine U.S. support for Ukraine and Israel alike — has lent his platform to anti-Pashinyan voices, including Amsterdam and Karapetyan’s nephew Narek Karapetyan, whose messaging dovetails with Moscow's line on Armenia. In an interview with Narek, Carlson's guest accused Pashinyan of waging "a war against Christianity" and pushing an "LGBTQ agenda" — rhetoric that mirrors precisely the civilizational framing Moscow uses across Eastern Europe. Carlson's audience reach means that narratives crafted for Armenian domestic consumption can be laundered through American media and returned to Armenian social media as evidence of "Western" skepticism of Pashinyan.

The combined effect is a pincer: Russian pressure from the East and opposition amplification from the West squeezing the Armenian government from every direction simultaneously. This convergence — whether coordinated or organic — represents a significant force multiplier for Moscow's campaign.

The Moldovan and Ukrainian Parallels

Russia's approach to Armenia is not novel. It follows a template Moscow has refined over two decades of interference in the domestic politics of its neighbors and beyond.

In Moldova, Russia spent hundreds of millions of euros on political meddling, according to President Maia Sandu. Moscow bankrolled opposition parties, deployed disinformation campaigns, and used economic leverage — particularly energy dependence — to punish governments that pursued European integration. Russian analysts have explicitly compared Armenia's trajectory to Moldova's. Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of research programs at the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, has stated that the "Moldovan scenario" represents a "voluntary renunciation of sovereignty and statehood" and warned that such an outcome for Armenia would be "extremely unfavorable."

In Ukraine, the template was even more destructive. Russia cultivated oligarchs like Viktor Medvedchuk, weaponized Russian-speaking populations, deployed the Orthodox Church as a political instrument, and waged a sustained information war before ultimately invading. The progression from soft influence to hard power is not inevitable, but the early stages in Armenia — the oligarch candidate, the church mobilization, the disinformation surge, the economic coercion — are disturbingly familiar.

A confidential 2024 report delivered to senior Russian officials by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin reportedly warnedthat Moscow is losing ground in Central Asia and the Caucasus. The June 7 election is the Kremlin's most immediate opportunity to reverse that trajectory. If Pashinyan falls and a pro-Russian government takes power, Moscow regains leverage over the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, TRIPP stalls or dies, and the Middle Corridor's development is set back by years.

The Electoral Landscape: Polling, Kocharyan, and the Pro-Russian Opposition

Understanding the effectiveness of Russia's campaign requires examining Armenia's domestic political landscape. The picture is one of widespread disillusionment with all political actors — but with important asymmetries that Moscow is trying to exploit.

Polling data paints a complex picture. According to the most recent EVN Report Armenian Election Study (second wave, conducted February–March 2026), Pashinyan's approval rating has risen to 47.2 percent, up from 36 percent in the first wave, and his Civil Contract party leads with 26.1 percent of vote intention. The opposition remains fragmented: Karapetyan's Strong Armenia comes second at 11.9 percent, while no other party approaches the parliamentary threshold. An earlier IRI survey showed just 13 percent trusting Pashinyan — but only 4 percent trusting his closest rival at the time, former President Robert Kocharyan. A staggering 61 percent of respondents said they trusted no political leader at all. Roughly 37 percent of voters remain undecided, making the election's outcome highly sensitive to the information environment and external events in the final weeks of the campaign.

Critically, Russia's standing in Armenia has plummeted since the 2020 Second Karabakh War and especially since 2023, when Russian peacekeepers stood aside as Azerbaijan retook Karabakh and its entire ethnic Armenian population was forced to flee. Public trust in Russia as a security guarantor — once the bedrock of the bilateral relationship — has collapsed. Polls show the Armenian public split on whether EU accession is achievable, but the old consensus that Russia provides reliable protection is gone. This is the paradox Moscow faces: its own perceived betrayal of Armenia created the conditions for Pashinyan's Western pivot, and now Moscow must use coercion rather than persuasion to reverse it.

Among the opposition candidates, Kocharyan is the most explicitly pro-Moscow figure with a realistic political base. Kocharyan, who leads the Hayastan (Armenia) Alliance, held his first press conference in three years in February 2025, ruling out retirement and declaring his intention to defeat Pashinyan. His framing of the conflict was revealing — and closely tracked the Kremlin's line. Asked why Russia failed to defend Armenia during the 2023 Azerbaijani offensive, Kocharyan defended Moscow, arguing that Pashinyan's recognition of Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh had "nullified Russia's mediating mandate" and asking, "Would any of you get in a fight for a friend who betrayed you?" A ruling party representative dismissed the performance, noting that "this press conference looked more like a press conference by the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson than by a former president." Kocharyan has also praised Iran's role in containing Azerbaijan, stating that without Tehran's opposition to an extraterritorial corridor through Armenia's Syunik province, "Aliyev wouldn't have any obstacles" to military action.

While polls show the Hayastan Alliance well below the parliamentary threshold, its votes have largely bled to Karapetyan's Strong Armenia — suggesting that the pro-Russian electorate is consolidating around the Kremlin's preferred candidate rather than dispersing. The political contest is thus between a weakened but leading Pashinyan and a fragmented but increasingly consolidated pro-Russian opposition backed by Moscow's full hybrid toolkit.

Implications for U.S. Strategy

The implications for American interests are significant and direct.

The peace process. Pashinyan has warned that his defeat would mean the collapse of the peace process with Azerbaijan. A Kremlin-aligned government would have every incentive to revive territorial disputes, freeze normalization, and return to the status quo ante in which Moscow brokered temporary truces while maintaining leverage over both sides. The White House's August 2025 achievement would be undone.

TRIPP and the Middle Corridor. Without a cooperative Armenian government, TRIPP cannot be built. Without TRIPP, the Middle Corridor remains incomplete, and Central Asian rare-earth resources remain accessible primarily through Russian and Chinese transit routes. This has direct implications for American supply chain diversification at a time of intensifying competition with Beijing.

The broader regional architecture. Armenia's elections do not occur in isolation. Georgia has already tilted back toward Russia. Kazakhstan faces its own Russian destabilization threats. If Armenia falls back into Moscow's orbit, the entire Western-aligned regional architecture — painstakingly built through the peace deal, TRIPP, and expanded bilateral relationships — begins to collapse. The signal to other post-Soviet states would be devastating: align with the West, and Washington will not protect you.

Conclusion

Russia's hybrid warfare campaign against Armenia is not a peripheral issue. It is a direct test of whether the United States can sustain its diplomatic achievements in the face of Russian subversion. The Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal, TRIPP, and the broader Western-aligned architecture in the South Caucasus and Central Asia represent significant strategic assets. Moscow's campaign to destroy them — through a combination of political pressure, economic coercion, disinformation, institutional subversion, and the mobilization of Western amplifiers — is comprehensive and escalating.

The Iran war has created both a distraction and an opportunity. With Tehran weakened and the broader Middle East in flux, the South Caucasus matters more, not less. But the window is closing. If Washington looks away for two more months, it may find that Putin has already won — not through tanks and missiles, but through the quieter and cheaper tools of hybrid warfare that Russia has spent decades perfecting.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an Expert at the N7 Foundation, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

As the war in Iran spreads beyond the Middle East, it is reshaping the South Caucasus, bringing rising proxy threats, refugee pressures, and shifting alliances to Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. In an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Georgian Service, Joseph Epstein, Director of the Turan Research Center and expert on Eurasia and the Middle East, explains that Azerbaijan faces direct attacks and pipeline threats, Georgia contends with pro-Iranian sentiment and security risks, and Armenia may gain room for Western-oriented initiatives. At the same time, Tehran’s regional aggression and Georgia’s pivot toward Russia, China, and Iran challenge US influence. Yet ongoing American engagement, sanctions, and strategic transit corridors give Washington leverage to shape Tbilisi’s decisions and protect its role in the Middle Corridor.

Read the full article on Georgia Today.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Turan Research Center Director Joseph Epstein spoke with Bahrain's Al Bilad newspaper on how Ukraine's battlefield experience in counter-drone warfare, electronic warfare, and asymmetric defense is creating new opportunities for strategic cooperation with Gulf states facing Iranian aerial threats. Epstein assessed that Kyiv's low-cost, field-proven interception solutions could fundamentally reshape Gulf air defense architecture, including multi-layered defense systems and civilian infrastructure protection.

Read the full interview on Al Bilad (Arabic).

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.

Five weeks into “Operation Epic Fury,” the war with Iran shows no end in sight. Some 1,500 miles to the north, however, a far more effective peace process is underway. Last week, the foreign ministers of Armeniaand Azerbaijan praised “positive developments” in their normalization process. Buried inside the two sides’ peace deal is a 27-mile corridor that may be the most consequential piece of infrastructure the United States has built abroad in a generation—and the war in Iran is proving why.

American power has historically followed the world’s narrowest passages. The Panama Canal is the defining example: a 50-mile strip across the Isthmus of Panama that reshaped global trade, projected US influence across the Western Hemisphere, and remained under American control for nearly nine decades.

The US-backed “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP) follows the pattern. The TRIPP is a transit corridor linking Azerbaijan’s mainland to its exclave of Nakhchivan through southern Armenia, near the Iranian border. Initialed at the White House last August after 32 years of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, TRIPP has the potential to become a new Eurasian chokepoint.

Read the full article on The National Interest.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.

Russia and Iran were supposed to be strategic partners. They signed a comprehensive partnership treaty last year, pledging deeper defense cooperation and economic integration. When the United States struck Iran, some predicted Russia would stand by its ally. Instead, Moscow has treated Tehran's war as a business opportunity—pocketing oil windfalls, leveraging Western desperation for energy and bleeding U.S. military resources through covert intelligence sharing, all while risking nothing of its own.

By every short-term measure, Russia is winning a war it is not fighting. But the Middle East that Russia spent two decades inserting itself into is being reshaped by forces Moscow can neither direct nor contain, and the long-term costs may outweigh the dividends.

Read the full article on Newsweek.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.

Turan Research Center Director Joseph Epstein spoke with RFE/RL's Azattyq Asia about the implications of the Strait of Hormuz crisis for Central Asia's energy producers. Below is an English translation of his comments, which appeared in the original Russian-language article.

On the scale of the crisis:

"In terms of the volume of supply under threat, this crisis is potentially larger than the 1973 embargo. The Arab oil embargo of that year removed roughly 4–5 million barrels per day from the market. According to JPMorgan estimates, the reduction in production and exports due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz could exceed 4 million barrels per day within weeks, and if Persian Gulf states exhaust their storage capacity and are forced to shut in production — which is already happening in Kuwait and Iraq — the cumulative scale of supply disruption could reach levels the modern oil market has never faced."

On the duration factor:

"If Iran's naval and missile capabilities are sufficiently degraded and the strait reopens, markets will begin to normalize. For Asia, however — especially India, Japan, South Korea, and LNG-importing countries across South and Southeast Asia — the short-term pain is very real. The situation much more closely resembles the 1973 experience: a physical supply deficit compounded by price inflation. And it is precisely in this context that the strategic significance of Central Asia rises sharply — as a landlocked alternative dependent on no maritime strait."

On the insurance dimension:

"Iran didn't need to mine the strait — it only needed to make oil and gas transit uninsurable. We are watching in real time as roughly 20 percent of global oil trade and approximately 20 percent of LNG trade is effectively removed from the market — not by a naval blockade, but by cheap drones and the insurance market's reaction to them."

On Kazakhstan's paradox:

"This is one of the great ironies of the moment. Oil prices surged roughly 35 percent in a week — Brent exceeded $92 per barrel — and Kazakhstan, as a major oil producer, should theoretically have reaped enormous revenue gains. But it cannot, because its export infrastructure is paralyzed. Around 80 percent of Kazakhstan's oil exports flow through the CPC pipeline to the Black Sea terminal at Novorossiysk, and that infrastructure has been seriously damaged by Ukrainian drone strikes since November 2025. Currently, only one of the terminal's three single-point moorings is operational. In other words, the price windfall exists on paper, but Kazakhstan physically cannot bring sufficient volumes to market to capitalize on it."

On the structural vulnerability:

"What is happening underscores Kazakhstan's structural vulnerability — its windfall revenues remain in the ground due to critical dependence on a single export corridor."

On the China factor:

"China, which imported roughly 40 percent of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, is now extremely interested in locking in supplies from Central Asia — primarily from Kazakhstan via the Atasu–Alashankou pipeline. This is a powerful combination — push from Kazakhstan and pull from China. However, the scale is limited: even at full capacity, Atasu–Alashankou can transport only a fraction of CPC volumes. Moreover, the supporting infrastructure — refining, spur lines, rail connections — is not yet ready for a rapid large-scale shift. The direction of travel is clear, but the pace of change is measured in years, not months."

On Turkmenistan and European gas:

"Theoretically, yes — and the political momentum has never been stronger. Turkmenistan holds the world's fourth-largest proven gas reserves, and Turkmen gas began flowing to Turkey last year through swap agreements via Iran. Turkey's ambassador to Ashgabat explicitly called for accelerating construction of the Trans-Caspian Pipeline as a medium- and long-term solution. But there are real constraints. Most of Turkmenistan's untapped production capacity is concentrated at the Galkynysh field in the southeast — far from the Caspian coast. Turkmenistan has committed to more than doubling its gas exports to China, bringing them to 65 billion cubic meters per year, which means direct competition for Turkmen gas between Chinese and European demand."

On Turkmen gas volumes for Europe:

"Turkmen gas could become a meaningful supplement to European supplies — on the order of 5–15 billion cubic meters per year through the Southern Gas Corridor — but it will not replace Russian or Qatari volumes on a large scale. Moreover, Turkmenistan's own policies sometimes limit its export potential. For instance, its 'delivery to the border' policy, which requires importers to build pipelines to the Turkmen border, is a serious obstacle."

On the collapse of Iran transit:

"If Iranian infrastructure degrades or transit becomes impossible, the only significant gas export route remaining for Turkmenistan will be the pipeline to China — which only deepens the dependence it has been trying to escape."

On the systemic risk:

"This crisis clearly demonstrates that Central Asia's energy infrastructure was built for a geopolitical reality that no longer exists. Every major export route runs through a country that is either involved in a war or under serious pressure — Russia, Iran, or regions where they can influence maritime routes. This is a systemic risk that cannot be solved by a single pipeline. This crisis is a strategic turning point, but whether Central Asia can capitalize on it depends entirely on infrastructure investment decisions made in the next 2–3 years."

On the three conditions for real change:

"The Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline moves from concept to construction; Kazakhstan diversifies its export routes beyond the CPC; and Western — above all American — capital begins to treat the region's infrastructure as a strategic priority rather than merely a commercial project."

On the historical pattern:

"History shows that energy diversification projects not launched during a crisis are almost never launched afterward."

Read the full article on RFE/RL's Azattyq Asia (Russian).

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.

Turan Research Center Director Joseph Epstein joins Arun Anand of the Nationalist view to discuss details of the Iran operation and how it effects Central Asia. In the interview, Epstein examines several critical questions: How are Central Asian states rerouting trade to global markets amid the connectivity crisis? Has the war weakened the Middle Corridor and pushed regional countries closer to Russia? Could instability in Iran trigger refugee flows or extremist spillover into the region? And with oil prices surging, what economic impact will the conflict have on Central Asian economies?

Watch the full interview here.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.

On Thursday morning, Iranian drones struck the passenger terminal of Nakhchivan International Airport and landed near a school in the village of Shakarabad, injuring four civilians in Azerbaijan's western exclave. President Ilham Aliyev called it "an act of terror against the territory of Azerbaijan" and placed his armed forcesat full combat readiness. Tehran denied involvement — however, Azerbaijan's Ministry of Defense stated that its technical monitoring systems confirmed four unmanned aerial vehicles from Iran's armed forces were directed toward the Nakhchivan region, with one neutralized by Azerbaijani forces and others targeting civilian infrastructure.

Shortly after the strikes, IRGC-linked Telegram channels went further than Tehran's official denials. The channel Sepah Pasdaran, which tracks and amplifies IRGC operations, published a post taking credit for the Nakhchivan attack and framing it as a warning shot — a signal that worse would follow if Azerbaijan continued its strategic alignment with Israel and the United States.

Separately, reports of strikes near Shamkir, a village close to the Georgian border through which the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline runs, raised the specter of an even graver escalation: a direct Iranian attack on the energy infrastructure that delivers Caspian oil to Europe and Israel, bypassing both Russia and Iran.

These are not stray rounds from a chaotic battlefield. They are the logical culmination of months of escalating Iranian threats against Azerbaijan — and the clearest evidence yet that Tehran's decision-making apparatus has crossed from strategic calculation into self-destructive overreach.

A Pattern, Not an Accident

Since the US-Israeli joint strikes on Iran began on February 28, Tehran has lashed out at an extraordinary range of targets. Iranian missiles and drones have hit Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and British sovereign territory in Cyprus. The Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed: tanker traffic has collapsed to near zero, major shipping companies have suspended transits, and more than 150 vessels are anchored outside the strait. Oil prices, already in the mid- to high-$70s before the escalation, have surged into the $80s.

Iran struck Saudi Arabia's Ras Tanura refinery and hit facilities in Qatar including Ras Laffan, temporarily halting LNG production. The US consulate in Dubai was hit by drones. The CIA headquarters in Riyadh was reportedly struck. An Amazon Web Services data center in the UAE lost power after being hit by Iranian munitions. Qatar shot down two Iranian Su-24 bombers — becoming the first nation to down Iranian aircraft in the conflict.

Against this backdrop, the strikes on Azerbaijan are not an aberration. They are the northern front of a regime-wide strategy to maximize damage to every node of the US-aligned regional order. Azerbaijan is a legitimate target in Tehran's eyes: it cooperates closely with Israel on defense and intelligence, supplies a significant share of Israel's crude oil through the BTC pipeline, and signed a US-brokered peace deal that granted Washington exclusive development rights to a strategic corridor on Iran's northern border. But understanding why Iran struck Azerbaijan is not the same as concluding that doing so was wise. To the contrary, the decision to attack Baku reveals a regime so consumed by the impulse to punish perceived enemies that it has lost the ability to weigh consequences.

Telegraphed Aggression

The attacks on Nakhchivan did not emerge from a vacuum. Tehran spent months publicly signaling that Azerbaijan was in the crosshairs — warnings that Western analysts largely dismissed.

In August 2025, days after Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a US-brokered peace treaty at the White House, Ali Akbar Velayati — a senior adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader — issued an extraordinary threat. "Mr. Trump thinks the Caucasus is a piece of real estate he can lease for 99 years," he told the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency. "This passage will not become a gateway for Trump's mercenaries — it will become their graveyard." The passage in question was the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), the US-backed land corridor through southern Armenia linking Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave and, by extension, to Turkey and Europe.

Velayati described TRIPP not as a trade route but as "a political plot" designed to position NATO "like a viper" between Iran and Russia. The IRGC's political deputy, Yadollah Javani, compared Aliyev and Pashinyan to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — a leader who, in Tehran's framing, invited hostile foreign forces into a neighbor's security zone and reaped catastrophe.

By January 2026, the threats had sharpened from geopolitical rhetoric to operational doctrine. Fars News Agency, an IRGC-affiliated outlet, published an explicit targeting framework. Israel's growing energy dependence on Azerbaijani oil, it argued, "transforms Azerbaijan into part of the security chain of the Zionist regime and places it on the front line of Iran's targeting." The piece articulated what it called a strategy of "preemptive regional defense": in any conflict, strikes would fall not only on the primary adversary but on the military bases, infrastructure, and interests of any country providing territory or capabilities for operations against Iran. "The red line has been drawn," Fars warned, "and crossing it will place Azerbaijan directly in Tehran's crosshairs."

On March 3 — just two days before the Nakhchivan strikes — the Masaf Institute, an IRGC-linked think tank, published a call to action on Telegram: "Tehran is being bombed from the Baku direction and the northern corridor... Now that we've gone all in, why are we still showing consideration for Baku? Strike that cursed Aliyev and dress him in mourning."

Simultaneously, an adviser to the IRGC commander warned that Tehran would target "the enemy's oil supply lines" and would not allow oil exports benefiting its adversaries to continue. Middle East Eye reported that senior Arab sources interpreted this as a direct reference to the BTC pipeline, one of the largest suppliers of Israel's crude oil.

The progression is unmistakable: from Velayati's August rhetoric to Fars News's January doctrine to Masaf Institute's March incitement to actual drone strikes within 48 hours. Each statement moved closer to operational language. Each was published through channels with direct IRGC connections — institutional organs of the security state.

Why the Strikes Are Suicidal

Iran has grievances against Azerbaijan. Some are real: Baku's deepening defense partnership with Israel, the flow of Caspian oil to Israeli refineries, and Washington's growing strategic footprint on Iran's northern border. But attacking Azerbaijan is the geopolitical equivalent of throwing a Molotov Cocktail while standing in gasoline. The risks are not proportional to any conceivable gain — and they threaten to accelerate the very encirclement Tehran fears.

Start with military reality. Azerbaijan's 2025 defense budget reached approximately $5 billion, and — as I wrote previously for the Turan Research Center — the money has gone overwhelmingly into systems designed for precisely the kind of threat Iran now poses. Post-2020, Baku has acquired Israeli-supplied Ice Breaker long-range standoff missiles, LORA ballistic missiles, Barak-8 and Barak MX air-defense systems, Harop and SkyStriker loitering munitions, Hermes 900 and Heron MALE-class drones, and advanced coastal and maritime surveillance platforms. This is not a force built for another campaign in Karabakh. It is a force built for Iranian contingencies — maritime denial in the Caspian, protection of offshore energy platforms, and defense of infrastructure corridors. Iran is now provoking a military that has spent years preparing for this exact scenario. Tehran also has a history of cultivating proxy infrastructure inside Azerbaijan — the Husseiniyyun, a Hezbollah-modeled group created under Qassem Soleimani's supervision in 2015, which has carried out assassination attempts, plotted attacks on the Israeli embassy, and runs an extensive propaganda network from Qom. But whatever disruptive potential these networks once held, the current crisis may have neutralized their utility: Baku's security services are now on maximum alert, and the political climate has turned overwhelmingly against Iran.

Then there is Turkey. The 2021 Shusha Declaration commits Ankara and Baku to consult and take joint action if either country's sovereignty, territorial integrity, or security is threatened by a third state. Turkey's foreign minister immediately called his Azerbaijani counterpart after the Nakhchivan strike and issued a statement "strongly" condemning the attack, adding that "Turkey will continue to stand by Azerbaijan, as it has historically." Turkey has demonstrated its willingness to project military power — in Libya, Syria, and the 2020 Karabakh war. So far, Ankara has stayed out of the Iran conflict. Striking Azerbaijani territory is the single fastest way to change that calculus, potentially drawing NATO's second-largest military into the war — a threshold Tehran has every reason to avoid but seems incapable of respecting.

Perhaps most dangerously for the regime, the strikes risk catalyzing Iran's own internal fault lines. An estimated third of Iran's 90 million population are ethnic Azerbaijanis, concentrated in the northwest — the country's second-largest ethnic group after Persians. Aliyev's statement during the Security Council meeting following the strikes that "the independent Azerbaijani state today is a source of hope for many Azerbaijanis living in Iran" is not rhetorical posturing. It reflects a genuine and long-standing Iranian vulnerability. Tehran has tried for years to cultivate Khomeinist loyalty among its Azerbaijani population, with mixed results: many remain hostile to the regime due to ethnic discrimination and systematic cultural repression. A shooting war with Baku could transform latent grievance into active destabilization at the worst possible moment for a regime already battered by US-Israeli strikes and facing a leadership vacuum after the killing of Khamenei.

The diplomatic optics compound the damage. Aliyev recounted in his Security Council address that on the morning of the strikes, Iran's deputy foreign minister called Baku requesting assistance evacuating Iranian embassy personnel stranded in Lebanon. Aliyev ordered an aircraft dispatched immediately and declined Iran's offer to cover costs. Hours later, drones hit Nakhchivan. "To disregard such a gesture, to belittle it, and to conduct themselves in a base and ungrateful manner brings honor to no one," Aliyev said. The sequence frames Iran not merely as aggressive but as erratic and faithless — a narrative that resonates across the region and beyond.

Loss of Strategic Coherence

The pattern of Iranian retaliation since February 28 does not resemble escalation dominance. It resembles a regime that has lost the ability to distinguish between deterrence and self-destruction.

Striking Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar — countries that host US military infrastructure — is aggressive but follows a recognizable strategic logic: raise the costs for America's regional partners until they pressure Washington to stop. Striking Cyprus, where British bases supported operations, is reckless but at least tracks a military rationale. Striking Azerbaijan — a country with a powerful military, a mutual defense pact with Turkey, and demographic leverage over a third of Iran's own population — follows no rational cost-benefit analysis. The potential blowback dwarfs any tactical benefit.

The IRGC's role in this escalation is central. The Guards are not merely a military force; they are a parallel state. Through entities such as the Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, the IRGC controls major infrastructure — railways, gas pipelines, dams, oil fields, ports, and energy projects — often through no-bid contracts. The bonyads, quasi-charitable foundations under Supreme Leader patronage, operate as vast conglomerates with tax exemptions, opaque finances, and dominance across industries from agriculture to banking to real estate. This institutional architecture creates powerful incentives for escalation: the IRGC's legitimacy and economic position depend on demonstrating potency and relevance, even — perhaps especially — when doing so is strategically counterproductive. The Guards' survival is inseparable from the narrative of resistance, and in a moment of existential crisis, institutional momentum overtakes rational cost-benefit analysis.

There are no visible defections within the security forces. The political system remains cohesive under pressure. But cohesion is not the same as competence. The regime is unified around a course of action that is simultaneously isolating it from every potential partner and neutral party in the region. As one Israeli analyst observed: Iran is uniting the Arab world, Europe, Turkey, and the Caucasus against itself, while handing its adversaries the legitimacy they previously lacked.

What This Means for US Policy

Iran's attacks on Nakhchivan and near the BTC pipeline should be understood as direct strikes on American strategic interests. TRIPP is not merely a trade route — it is the physical manifestation of US strategy to bypass Russian and Iranian chokepoints in Eurasia, connect Central Asian energy and critical minerals to European markets, and anchor American influence in a region where Washington has historically been a secondary player.

The vulnerability of BTC and TRIPP infrastructure to Iranian strikes now demands a policy response. Integrated air and missile defense along the corridor — potentially involving US, Turkish, and Israeli systems — should be elevated from a theoretical discussion to an operational priority. Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry has already stated that "these acts of aggression will not go unanswered." Baku is preparing response measures. Washington must decide whether to support its corridor partner's response or risk the perception — in Baku, Ankara, and across Central Asia — that American commitments evaporate under pressure.

Most critically, the terms of any future ceasefire must account for what the past week has revealed. Any deal that relieves pressure on the regime without addressing its capacity to strike regional infrastructure will leave TRIPP and BTC permanently vulnerable. Iran's nuclear program, its long-range missile arsenal, and its proxy networks must be treated as a single, indivisible package. Partial concessions would merely postpone the problem, allowing a battered but surviving regime to regroup and threaten the region again. The "maximum pressure" strategy loses its edge the moment relief arrives prematurely.

Iran's horizontal escalation is not a sign of strength. It is the flailing of a regime whose supreme leader is dead, whose military infrastructure is being systematically degraded, and whose institutional reflexes have overwhelmed whatever remains of strategic reason. Attacking Azerbaijan — a well-armed, Turkish-allied state with leverage over Iran's own ethnic fault lines — is the most self-defeating move in a week of self-defeating moves. The question now is not whether Iran's recklessness will be checked, but whether the international community will seize the moment to ensure it cannot regenerate.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an Expert at the N7 Foundation, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

With the Iranian regime decapitated by a joint U.S.-Israeli strike that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and several top commanders, and with a resurgent Sunni extremist axis led by Turkey and Qatar gaining ground, the United States faces a pivotal choice in the Middle East. It should proceed by building a coalition of moderates — anchored by Israel, Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates — that is capable of countering both Iranian aggression and the rising tide of Sunni radicalism.

That emerging extremist Sunni axis, fueled by Muslim Brotherhood ideology, Turkish military ambition and Qatari money, is pulling in cautious allies such as Saudi Arabia — nations whose recent surges in anti-Jewish rhetoric signal an ideological drift that should alarm Washington.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s answer is essentially a revival of the “Periphery Doctrine” that aimed to counter hostile Arab nationalism through clandestine alliances with non-Arab states and minority groups in the Middle East. Netanyahyu has proposed a counterweight coalition, mentioning India, Greece and Cyprus. But the key to any alliance fighting extremist Islam is Muslim countries that can put forward a contrasting and appealing vision.

Read the full article on The Washington Post.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

On February 15, 2026, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Radio Iran's Pashto service that Kabul would be prepared to cooperate with the Islamic Republic in the event of a U.S. military attack — if Tehran formally requested assistance. He added that Iran had emerged victorious from its June 2025 war with Israel and would prevail again against Washington. The statement was extraordinary on its face: the world's most prominent Sunni jihadist movement publicly offering military solidarity to a Shia theocracy it once nearly went to war with. Yet the declaration was less a rupture than a culmination — the latest expression of a pragmatic alignment that has been deepening for over a decade, driven not by ideological convergence but by shared adversaries, mutual dependence, and the strategic logic of survival under pressure.

Iran’s engagement with the Taliban has evolved from tactical coordination during the insurgency to a pragmatic working relationship since the group’s return to power in August 2021. Despite deep ideological differences and a history of confrontation, Tehran has prioritized strategic interests over sectarian or doctrinal considerations. This relationship has yielded tangible benefits for both sides, while remaining transactional, asymmetric, and subject to significant constraints.

Origins of Tactical Cooperation

Evidence of Iran–Taliban engagement surfaced publicly in May 2016, when a a U.S. drone strike killed Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour then leader of the Taliban near the Iranian-Pakistani border. U.S. Intelligence agencies later indicated that Mansour had been returning from Iran. At the time, Mansour was widely regardedas the Taliban’s arms and narcotics czar, overseeing the group’s finances and transnational networks. According to the U.S. intelligence assessment, his trip to Iran was intended to facilitate tactical coordination. Mansour’s assassination publicly exposed the depth of Iran-Taliban engagement in the context of their shared opposition to Western influence in Afghanistan.

Subsequent developments reinforced these assessments. In October 2017, the Taliban launched a large-scale offensive on Farah City, the capital of Farah Province bordering Iran, effectively besieging the city until U.S. air support enabled Afghan forces to repel the offensive. Afghan security officials later Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, acting through Taliban proxies. The Taliban again demonstrated increased operational capacity in Farah Province in 2018, briefly capturing parts of the provincial capital.

This episode underscored Iran’s willingness to engage the Taliban as a means of countering U.S. and Western influence in Afghanistan, even as ideological tensions persisted.

Historical Background: Ideological Hostility and Early Confrontation

The relationship between Iran and the Taliban has been shaped by deep sectarian, ideological, and geopolitical divides. The Taliban's rise in the mid-1990s as a Pashtun-dominated, ultra-conservative Sunni movement — backed primarily by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — directly challenged Iran's interests. Tehran viewed the group as an ideological rival aligned with its regional adversaries, hostile to Shia communities, and threatening to create an unstable, anti-Iranian regime on its eastern border. The Taliban's persecution of the Shia Hazara minority and its disruption of Iranian influence routes into Central Asia further heightened tensions.

Unlike Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which recognized the Taliban regime that came to power in 1996, Iran refused to do so and instead provided military, financial, and logistical support to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance (United Islamic Front). Qasem Soleimani, who assumed command of the IRGC Quds Force around 1998, played a central role in this effort, advocating for intensified proxy support — including arms shipments, training, intelligence, and operational coordination — to sustain Northern Alliance resistance without risking direct Iranian military confrontation. This approach allowed Iran to counter the Taliban at lower cost while preserving regional leverage.

Relations reached their nadir in August 1998 when Taliban forces overran the Iranian consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, killing eight to eleven Iranian diplomats and a journalist, and carried out large-scale massacres of Hazara civilians. Iran mobilized some 200,000 troops along the Afghan border, and war was averted only through UN mediation and diplomatic pressure. The episode reinforced Iran's view of the Taliban as an existential regional threat, while also illustrating a pattern that would define future engagement: despite their ideological extremism, Taliban leaders have repeatedly shown a readiness to accept tactical support from former adversaries and ideologically distant powers — including Iran, Russia, and China — when it serves their goals of survival, reducing isolation, and consolidating power.

Following the U.S.-led intervention in late 2001, Iran initially cooperated with Washington, providing intelligence support and facilitating the Bonn process for forming a new Afghan government. However, as the U.S. and NATO presence became a long-term fixture perceived as encirclement, elements of the IRGC shifted to a hedging strategy. While maintaining ties with the Kabul government, Iran began offering limited tactical support — weapons, training, and safe passage — to Taliban insurgents fighting coalition forces. The Taliban pragmatically accepted such assistance despite doctrinal differences, prioritizing battlefield gains and diplomatic breathing room over ideological consistency.

Cultivating Influence Across Ideological Lines

Iran’s approach was notable for its focus on cultivating relationships with senior Taliban figures associated with the movement’s Kandahar-based leadership, traditionally regarded as its most doctrinaire faction.

According to reporting by the Rand Corporation, the IRGC concentrated its engagement with the Taliban in the border provinces of Farah, Nimruz, and Herat. Iran invested heavily in cultivating relationships with Key Taliban leaders who today occupy senior positions within the regime, including Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir (Deputy Minister of Defense), Mohammad Ibrahim Sadar (Deputy Minister of Interior), and Mullah Mohammad Shirin Akhund (Governor of Kandahar Province). All three are considered close associates of the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hebatullah Akhundzada.

Iran’s success in building durable ties with this faction reflects a strategic calculation that influence over core leadership networks would yield greater long-term leverage than outreach to peripheral or more pragmatic elements.

Engagement After the Fall of Kabul

Iran openly welcomed the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021. Unlike most foreign missions, Iran kept its embassy and consulate in Herat operational after the Taliban took Kabul. Iranian officials publicly framed the U.S, withdrawal as an opportunity for regional stabilization and peace.

In February 2023, Iran became the second neighboring country after Pakistan to formally hand over the Afghan embassy to Taliban representatives. Although relations experienced periodic tensions — particularly over border incidents, water rights, and the refugee crisis — Tehran has consistently avoided steps that would fundamentally alienate the Taliban, a posture largely reciprocated by Kabul.

High-level exchanges continued throughout 2023 and beyond, with Taliban delegations visiting Tehran, and Iranian officials travelling to Kabul. To date, Tehran has derived tangible benefits from this relationship, particularly in the areas of trade, border security, and intelligence cooperation against ISIS-K and other militant groups. The Taliban, in turn, have benefited from Iran’s political engagement, diplomatic legitimacy, and economic access — most notably through full use of Iran’s Chabahar port.

Trade, Leverage, and Strategic Opportunity

Sanctions have pushed both Tehran and the Taliban into a shared strategic corner. Isolated financially and diplomatically, both actors are now incentivized to innovate methods of evasion. For the Taliban, the objective is straightforward: survival and regime consolidation. For Tehran, however, Afghanistan represents something more strategic — a relatively under-monitored space where it can quietly advance regional ambitions.

A recent report by Israel’s Channel 14 suggests that this convergence may be deepening. Tehran is allegedly building a covert network through Taliban channels to facilitate financial transfers to Hezbollah and to establish contingency escape routes for senior Iranian officials in the event of a major military confrontation with the United States or Israel.

The alleged involvement of Mohammad Ebrahim Taherian-Fard, an experienced IRGC-QF operative with deep familiarity in Afghanistan, indicates that this initiative may be structured and strategic rather than opportunistic. The reported participation of Kamaluddin Nabizada, an Afghan businessman already sanctioned by Washington for facilitating IRGC and Hezbollah financial operations, further underscores the sanctions-evasion dimension.

Channel 14 has since reported an additional dimension to this relationship. According to senior Iran analyst Dror Balazada, the regime covertly dispatched Nabizada — already facing corruption charges — to approach the Taliban about assisting Tehran in suppressing internal uprisings. The Taliban leader reportedly refused, instead demanding a formal request from Tehran. The episode is revealing on multiple levels: it illustrates the regime's growing desperation over domestic unrest, its willingness to seek help from an ideologically alien partner, and the limits of its leverage over Kabul. The Taliban's insistence on a formal request suggests a movement increasingly conscious of its bargaining position — willing to cooperate, but not to be instrumentalized quietly.

If substantiated, these developments would illustrate how sanctioned actors increasingly cooperate not out of ideological alignment alone, but out of shared necessity — reshaping Afghanistan into a potential logistical rear base for Iran’s regional security architecture.

Economic engagement has become a central pillar of Iran’s Taliban policy. As Taliban–Pakistan relations deteriorated over disputes related to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and border management, Tehran moved to position itself as Afghanistan’s primary economic partner.

During his November 2025 visit to Kabul, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi announced that bilateral trade between Iran and Afghanistan had surpassed Iran’s total trade volume with all European countries combined. For Iran, which remains under extensive international sanctions, Afghanistan offers a nearby and relatively accessible market for oil, industrial goods, and manufactured products.

The increasing use of Iran’s Chabahar port as Afghanistan’s primary maritime outlet — displacing Karachi — has further deepened Kabul’s economic dependence on Tehran. The shift has enhanced Iran’s structural leverage over the Taliban, particularly at a time when normalization with Pakistan appears unlikely.

Constraints and Frictions

Despite these gains, Iran’s influence over the Taliban remains limited. Tehran recognizes that distancing itself from the Taliban would create opportunities for rival regional actors. Nevertheless, its efforts to position itself as a mediator between the Taliban and Afghan opposition groups have met resistance. The Taliban recently declined to participate in a regional dialogue hosted in Tehran, underscoring the limits of Iranian diplomatic leverage.

Water security remains another major point of friction. The Taliban’s continued construction of dams on rivers flowing toward Iran’s arid eastern provinces has triggered public outrage among Iranian parliamentarians and analysts. Farhad Shahraki and Ahmad Bakhshayesh Urdestani, prominent Iranian MPs, denounced the Taliban’s water policy and questioned the Iranian government’s complacency while calling for the use of force to ensure Iran’s fair water share. However, official Tehran has largely downplayed the issue to avoid escalating tensions with Kabul.

Security cooperation has helped stabilize much of Iran’s eastern border, but vulnerabilities persist. ISIS-K, Jaysh al-Adl, narcotics trafficking, and irregular migration remain enduring challenges. These shared threats continue to incentivize tactical coordination between Tehran and Kabul.

Afghan Opposition Figures and Growing Concerns

Iran continues to host several prominent Afghan political and military figures opposed to the Taliban, including former Herat governor Mohammad Ismail Khan and Shiite Hazara leader Mohammad Mohaqiq. Iran is also home to large numbers of former Afghan National Security Forces personnel.

However, Iran’s deportation of undocumented Afghan refugees has raised concerns among opposition figures. According to a UN report, 1.8 million Afghans were deported from Iran in 2025. Most of these deportations took place around the 12-Day War, with Iranian officials accusing some Afghan refugees of spying for Israel.These mass deportations followed a previous crackdown, in which Afghan refugees were blamed for social disorder, representing a security threat, and increasing unemployment among. Reports suggest that some former Afghan security personnel have been forcibly returned to Afghanistan and subsequently detained or killed. In August 2025, The Telegraph reported that the IRGC is cooperating with Taliban intelligence to identify and track Afghan nationals who assisted the United Kingdom.

Concerns intensified following the assassinations of two prominent anti-Taliban figures in Iran in 2025. In September, Maroof Ghulami, head of the Council of Jihadi Commanders in western Afghanistan and a close associate of Ismail Khan, was killed in his office in Mashhad. In December, General Ikramuddin Saree, a former senior police general and outspoken Taliban critic, was shot dead near his home in Tehran.

Opposition groups such as the National Resistance Front (NRF) swiftly blamed the Taliban for the latter attack. Leaders of both the NRF and the Afghanistan Freedom Front called on Iranian authorities to conduct a transparent investigation. Iranian authorities issued limited public responses, and no findings have been released. For many Afghan opposition figures, such developments signal that Iran.

Conclusion: Iranian Goals, Influence, and Mutual Utility

Iran’s policy toward the Taliban is driven primarily by strategic considerations. Tehran seeks to prevent renewed U.S. or hostile regional influence in Afghanistan, secure its eastern borders, counter ISIS-K, manage refugee flows, ensure access to water resources, and expand economic leverage under sanctions. Engagement with the Taliban has proven more effective in advancing these objectives than confrontation.

Iran’s influence is substantial but not decisive. It is strongest in economic interdependence, border security coordination, intelligence cooperation, and selective political legitimacy. However, Tehran lacks the ability to fundamentally shape Taliban governance or compel concessions on sensitive issues such as water rights, internal repression, or engagement with opposition groups.

For the Taliban, the relationship offers diplomatic recognition, economic lifelines, trade access, and a powerful regional patron capable of balancing Pakistan. Yet this engagement also deepens Kabul’s dependence on Tehran and constrains the Taliban’s strategic autonomy.

Ultimately, Iran–Taliban relations reflect a pragmatic alignment driven by converging interests rather than trust or ideological convergence. While mutually beneficial in the short term, the relationship remains fragile, transactional, and vulnerable to shifting regional dynamics.

Hussain Ehsani is a Research Fellow at the Turan Research Center. He previously was a senior researcher at the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Tehran.
Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Director Joseph Epstein comments on Vice President J.D. Vance's visit to Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“TRIPP didn’t emerge from a vacuum — it became possible because the geopolitical architecture Russia spent thirty years constructing has begun to collapse. The contrast is stark: three decades of Russian-led mediation produced no peace, only managed hostility and isolation. Less than a year of serious U.S. engagement has produced a Strategic Partnership Charter, a civil nuclear framework, and the contours of a transformative regional corridor. TRIPP is the architecture of a post-Russian South Caucasus and this visit shows how much of a priority it is for Washington.”

Read the full interview on the N7 Foundation.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

A fresh round of US-brokered peace talks between Russia and Ukraine is taking place this week as the Trump administration seeks to reach a deal by early summer. While pro-Ukrainian voices warn that any agreement lacking ironclad security guarantees for Kyiv could embolden Moscow to go further into Moldova or test NATO in the Baltics, the biggest threat may be to countries elsewhere in the former Soviet space.

There are already signs that Russia is turning its imperial appetite toward the South Caucasus and Central Asia, where the groundwork for destabilization appears to be well underway. Any negotiated settlement in Ukraine that ignores these regions will not end the current war; it will merely relocate it.   

Russian nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, who is often called “Putin’s brain,” declared last month that no post-Soviet state should possess sovereignty. Instead, he argued, Moscow “has no choice but to restore the Russian Empire.” Days earlier, leading Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov called for Russia to conduct “special military operations” similar to the invasion of Ukraine in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Read the full article on the Atlantic Council.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Iran may have a new weapon in its shadow war against the West—and it’s one that Tehran spent decades fighting: Sunni jihadists.

Last week, Azerbaijani security forces arrested three men planning to attack the Israeli embassy in Baku. The suspects claimed allegiance to ISIS-K, the Afghan branch of the Islamic State responsible for the devastating Crocus City Hall massacre in Moscow that killed 145 people in 2024. On its face, this looks like another data point in ISIS-K’s expanding campaign of global terror.

But look closer, and a more troubling picture emerges—one that should concern policymakers in Washington. The South Caucasus is becoming a new front in the shadow war between Iran and its enemies, and the Islamic Republic may be using Sunni extremists as a cover for its own malign activities.

Read the full article on The National Interest.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.

Joseph Epstein comments for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance's upcoming trip to Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“It’s noteworthy that it’s Vance on this trip,” Joseph Epstein, director of the Washington-based Yorktown Institute's Turan Research Center, told RFE/RL. “He represents a more isolationist part of the White House, but he’s going to be championing deals on this trip that weaken Russian and Iranian influence -- and the throughline is critical minerals.”

Vance will be the most senior US official to ever visit Armenia and is the first to visit Azerbaijan since former US Vice President Dick Cheney in 2008.

“There hasn’t been engagement with the region of this kind since the Bush administration, and that was largely all through Georgia,” said Epstein.

Read the full article on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.

Iran is facing a water emergency that hydrologists and environmental experts warn may now be irreversible. Major reservoirs are depleted, groundwater reserves are collapsing, and senior officials are openly warning of citizens rationing water and even evacuating the capital due to water shortages. While the crisis is often attributed to drought or climate change, experts stress that it is overwhelmingly man-made—the cumulative result of decades of over-extraction, mismanagement, and failure to modernize water governance.

Paradoxically, many of the most effective technical solutions to Iran’s water crisis have already been developed by its regional adversary, Israel. Through innovations in drip irrigation, wastewater recycling, desalination, and integrated water management, Israel has achieved water security under harsher natural constraints than Iran faces today. This article argues that Iran’s crisis is no longer a problem of awareness or technology, but of political, financial, and institutional barriers—and that proven Israeli approaches, if accessed indirectly, could still mitigate the most destabilizing consequences of a crisis experts say can no longer be fully reversed.

Read the full article on the Atlantic Council.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center. Dalga Khatinoglu is an independent energy expert.

Turan Research Center Director Joseph Epstein shares his thoughts on the latest U.S.-India trade deal for an N7 Brief.

“The linkage of tariff relief to India curbing Russian oil purchases underscores how energy geopolitics can shape trade agendas, but it also risks oversimplifying New Delhi’s nuanced balancing act. Nevertheless, a meaningful reduction — or halt — in Indian imports of Russian oil would repreent a significant strategic and economic win for the United States and its allies.”

Read the full article on the N7 Foundation.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.

On January 27, 2026, Azerbaijan's State Security Service announced the arrest of three young men for plotting an attack on a foreign embassy in Baku. The timing was striking: Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar had concluded meetings with President Ilham Aliyev just one day earlier. While Azerbaijani authorities did not officially name the target, multiple Israeli outlets confirmed it was their embassy.

Azerbaijani security services attributed the plot to Islamic State-Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K — the Afghan offshoot that has executed some of the deadliest terrorist attacks of recent years, including the March 2024 Crocus City Hall massacre in Moscow that killed 149 people. The suspects had allegedly obtained weapons and finalized their plans before security forces intercepted them.

The announcement received modest international attention. It should not have. The incident represents either a significant expansion of ISIS-K's operational reach into the South Caucasus or — more likely — evidence of a strategic shift in how Iran conducts covert operations in the South Caucasus.

A Pattern of Threats

This was not an isolated incident. Israeli and Jewish targets in Azerbaijan have faced a troubling series of threats in recent months. Despite close ties between Jerusalem and Baku and low levels of societal antisemitism, foreign operatives have historically managed to recruit locals for terrorist attacks. In October, an Azerbaijani court sentenced an ISIS-K affiliate to thirteen years in prison for plotting a Molotov cocktail attack on a Baku synagogue. The Conference of European Rabbis, scheduled to convene in Baku in November, was canceled over security concerns; organizers declined to provide further details.

Historically, such threats emanated from a different source: the Husseiniyyun, an ethnic Azerbaijani Shia militia created by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. While Azerbaijan's government is staunchly secular and a majority of the population is Shia Muslim, roughly a third adheres to Sunni Islam — a demographic reality that complicates assumptions about sectarian allegiance. The recent appearance of Sunni extremists allegedly operating at ISIS-K's direction marks a departure that demands explanation.

Two hypotheses present themselves. The first accepts the official attribution at face value: ISIS-K, emboldened by successful high-profile attacks, has expanded its ambitions to the Caucasus. The second posits that Iranian intelligence services recruited the cell, using the ISIS-K banner to obscure Tehran's fingerprints. An examination of both ISIS-K's recent trajectory and Iran's documented methods suggests the latter to be more likely.

Marginal, But Exploitable

Jihadist networks in Azerbaijan are not new, though they remain small compared to other Muslim-majority countries. Salafist communities took root in northern districts like Ismayilli and Sheki in the 1990s, later becoming modest recruitment hubs. When ISIS declared its caliphate in 2014, an estimated 200 to 300 Azerbaijanis — many of them Sunni radicals from these northern regions — traveled to fight in Syria and Iraq. The government responded with criminal code amendments and waves of arrests, and the country's strong secular identity and robust security apparatus have kept extremist networks marginal.

Yet ISIS-K's recent focus on Azerbaijan suggests even limited infrastructure can be exploited. In May 2025, Azerbaijani authorities extradited four nationals who had attended training camps on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border — an area strongly associated with ISIS-K activity — two others were arrested for financing. The December 2024 synagogue plot and the January 2026 embassy conspiracy indicate the group — or someone using its banner — has identified Azerbaijan as operational territory.

The Tajikistan Template

Iran's willingness to collaborate with Sunni extremists when geopolitical interests align is well-documented. Palestinian factions including Hamas and Islamic Jihad have received sustained Iranian support despite their Sunni affiliation. Tehran has maintained tactical relationships with the Taliban, providing limited assistance since the U.S. invasion in 2001 and expanding cooperation after the Taliban's return to power in 2021. Even Al-Qaeda senior leaders have received safe havenin Iran and been allowed to use the country as a base to organize terrorist activities.

But Tajikistan offers the most relevant precedent. Materials released by Tajik authorities reveal a systematic pattern of Iranian intelligence operations on Tajik territory, encompassing recruitment, proxy deployment, and the organization of terrorist attacks.

Consider the July 2018 ISIS attack in Tajikistan's Khatlon region that killed four foreign cyclists — two Americans, one Dutch national, and one Swiss citizen. According to testimony from the sole surviving detained suspect, key participants had undergone ideological indoctrination and military training between 2014 and 2015 in the Iranian city of Qom and at a camp in Mazandaran province. The attack's organizer had studied at religious institutions in Iran and received training at IRGC facilities before recruiting Tajik labor migrants in Russia on behalf of Iranian intelligence. The banned Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan reportedly served as a convenient cover for these recruitment activities.

A pattern emerges from Tajik security files: the IRGC has used the ISIS flag to conceal Iranian involvement in terrorist operations. Using ISIS also gives access to Tajik extremists, as the country’s significantly smaller Shia population has been traditionally shaped by the pro-Western influence of Aga Khan. In 2018, Tajik security services prevented an attacknear the Russian 201st Military Base in Dushanbe, detaining thirteen individuals who had trained with Iranian instructors. Subsequent investigations revealed that the operation's coordinator had been recruited in Moscow by Iranian intelligence, trained near Tehran, and dispatched with twenty-two other Tajik nationals to carry out attacks on government officials and foreign installations. The method proved effective — ISIS received blame while Iran preserved deniability.

Risks and Rewards

This strategy carries obvious dangers. ISIS-K maintains a violent hostility toward Shia Islam and Iranian interests. The January 2024 bombing at General Qassem Soleimani's memorial in Kerman — which killed at least 95 people — demonstrated ISIS-K's willingness to strike at the Islamic Republic's symbolic heart. Deploying such groups as proxies risks catastrophic blowback.

Yet the benefits may outweigh the risks from Tehran's perspective. Iran has consistently used proxy forces to maintain distance from operations that could trigger international retaliation. By employing groups nominally opposed to Iranian interests, it achieves an additional layer of deniability. This consideration has grown more pressing as Iran's regional position has deteriorated.

Iran's strategic interests in the South Caucasus are substantial and under threat. The Aliyev government is secular, maintaining close relationships with both Turkey and Israel — a posture that alarms Tehran on multiple fronts. The deepening Azerbaijan-Israel relationship, encompassing weapons sales, intelligence cooperation, and energy partnerships, represents a security concern on Iran's northern border. More fundamentally, Azerbaijan's existence as a prosperous, secular homeland to the Azerbaijani people presents an uncomfortable example to Iran's large ethnic Azerbaijani minority: a vision of what might be possible without rule by religious ideologues.

The Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, if concluded, would remove a source of regional instability that Tehran has historically exploited. Most significantly, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), backed by the United States, threatens to diminish Iranian influence and expand American engagement in a region Tehran considers its sphere of interest. As details of TRIPP emerge and agreements take shape, these strategic imperatives have become more pressing.

An attack on the Israeli embassy during a high-profile ministerial visit would have served multiple Iranian objectives simultaneously. It would demonstrate that Jews and Israelis are not safe even in allied countries. It would intimidate Azerbaijan and other Muslim-majority nations that maintain ties with Israel. And it would signal to the Azerbaijani population that their government cannot maintain basic security — all while the ISIS-K attribution shielded Tehran from direct accountability.

The Alternative Hypothesis

While unlikely, the possibility that ISIS-K acted independently cannot be dismissed. The group has demonstrated both the capability and intent to conduct high-profile transnational attacks. The March 2024 assault on Crocus City Hall, which left 149 dead and more than 600 wounded, established ISIS-K as the most lethal transnational terrorist threat in years. The Kerman bombing three months earlier had already demonstrated the group's reach into Iran itself.

ISIS-K has pursued a deliberate strategy of internationalizing its operations since the Taliban's 2021 return to power created a more permissive environment. The group has targeted interests from Pakistan, India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, and Russia, marking a calculated expansion beyond its traditional Afghanistan-Pakistan base. Just last week, an ISIS-K suicide bomber killed seven people, including a Chinese national, at a restaurant in Kabul — part of a sustained campaign against Chinese citizens in retaliation for Beijing's treatment of Uyghur Muslims.

Expanding to the Caucasus would fit this pattern. The group has cultivated relationships with Uyghur militant organizations and published propaganda in Tajik and other Central Asian languages. Its leader, Sanaullah Ghafari, is himself reportedly an ethnic Tajik. High-profile attacks generate recruitment, funding, and influence across the jihadist spectrum — commodities ISIS-K actively seeks.

Weighing the Evidence

Several factors tip the balance toward Iranian involvement. The target selection — the Israeli embassy during a ministerial visit — aligns precisely with Iran's documented priorities in Azerbaijan. The suspects were local Azerbaijanis, not the Central Asian migrants who typically execute ISIS-K operations abroad. Iran possesses established recruitment networks in Azerbaijan through the Husseiniyyun and related Shia networks. And the operational pattern mirrors the Tajikistan template: local recruits, ISIS cover, strategic benefit to Tehran.

The decentralized nature of organizations like ISIS-K makes them vulnerable to exactly this kind of exploitation. Iran does not need to coordinate with ISIS-K leadership in Afghanistan to recruit sympathetic individuals, provide training and weapons, and assign targets — all while allowing the recruits to believe they are serving the caliphate's cause.

None of this constitutes proof. Azerbaijani authorities have not released details of the investigation that would clarify the chain of command or expose any Iranian role. What can be said with confidence is that the incident deserves more scrutiny than it has received. If Iran has indeed adopted Sunni extremist cover for operations in the South Caucasus, the implications extend well beyond this single foiled plot. It would represent an evolution in Iranian tradecraft with significant consequences for regional security.

Policy Implications

For Azerbaijan, the incident underscores the complexity of its security environment. The country must contend not only with traditional Iranian pressure through Shia proxies but potentially with Sunni extremist cells that may or may not operate at Tehran's direction. Enhanced intelligence cooperation with Israel and Western partners becomes more valuable under these circumstances.

For the United States and its allies, the incident reinforces the importance of tracking ISIS-K's external operations while remaining alert to the possibility of state manipulation. The line between independent jihadist violence and state-sponsored terrorism has never been bright; it may be growing dimmer.

For Iran, the foiled attack — regardless of who ordered it — represents a setback. The Azerbaijani government has demonstrated the capability to detect and prevent such plots. The public attribution to ISIS-K, whether accurate or a diplomatic convenience, spares direct Iranian-Azerbaijani confrontation while putting Tehran on notice that its options for covert action are narrowing.

The three young men in Azerbaijani custody may have believed they were soldiers of the caliphate. They may have been pawns in a larger game they did not fully understand. The distinction matters less than the outcome: a plot disrupted, an attack prevented, and a reminder that in the murky space where terrorism and statecraft intersect, the most important questions often go unanswered.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Introduction

In January 2025, reports emerged that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had assured U.S. envoy Steven Witkoff that Tehran would not carry out 800 executions of protesters. According to multiple accounts, this assurance may have led President Donald Trump to halt a planned military strike against Iran. The episode raises a question with serious implications for both Iranian society and U.S. policy: Will the Islamic Republic follow through on mass executions, or will strategic considerations stay its hand?

The answer lies not in diplomatic assurances — which Tehran has broken before — but in understanding the regime's internal calculus when ideology collides with survival. For over four decades, the Islamic Republic has navigated between revolutionary principle and strategic necessity, sometimes sacrificing enormous national interests for ideological purity, and at other times shelving sacred commitments to preserve the system itself. The historical record reveals clear patterns about when each imperative prevails, offering insights into whether the current wave of protesters faces the gallows or a reprieve.

This paper examines the ideological and strategic factors that will determine the fate of Iran's detained protesters. It analyzes past episodes when the regime prioritized revolutionary doctrine over national interest, contrasts these with moments when survival imperatives forced ideological compromise, and applies these patterns to assess the likelihood of mass executions. The conclusion challenges conventional Western assumptions about both Iranian decision-making and the efficacy of external pressure.

The Doctrine of System Preservation

To understand Iran's approach to domestic dissent, one must first grasp the theological framework that governs the Islamic Republic. The regime operates on the principle of Velayat-e Faqih, or Guardianship of the Jurist, which transforms political survival into religious obligation. Protecting the Islamic government is not merely a matter of state security — it is a divine duty that supersedes conventional ethical constraints.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution's founder, articulated this principle with stark clarity. In various speeches, he declared that preserving the Islamic system constitutes the highest religious obligation, particularly when facing internal or external threats. In a 1983 address to officials, Khomeini went further, stating that maintaining the Islamic Republic "takes precedence over the life of any single person, even Imam Mahdi" — the twelfth Shi'a Imam revered as the promised redeemer. The statement is theologically radical: it places the political system above the most sacred figure in Shi'a eschatology.

After 1979, the regime systematically subordinated Iran's traditional religious establishment to political control, monopolizing the interpretation of Shi'ism and defining what constitutes proper Islamic governance. No religious authority could challenge these definitions without risking persecution. This consolidation meant that threats to the regime could be framed as threats to Islam itself, requiring a religious response from all faithful Muslims in Iran.

The doctrine has been implemented with brutal consistency. In April 1979, security forces suppressed an uprising in Khuzestan province, killing more than a hundred Arab Iranians seeking autonomy. The Kurdish revolt, which began in March 1979 and lasted over four years, claimed 5,000 Kurdish fighters and resulted in 1,200 executions. But the most chilling application came in the summer of 1988, when Khomeini ordered the mass execution of political prisoners — including leftists, Kurdish activists, and Baha'is — even as the Iran-Iraq War was ending and the country desperately needed reconstruction. Between July and December of that year, between 2,800 and 5,000 people were executed without trial in Iranian prisons.

These principles remain operative today. Following the suppression of the 2022 "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests, then-President Ebrahim Raisi visited the Fatehin Special Unit — an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) formation responsible for crushing dissent — and reiterated that "preserving the Islamic system is the highest religious obligation."

The Legal Machinery of Religious Repression

The regime's willingness to execute protesters rests on two complementary concepts embedded in the Islamic Republic's criminal law: Mohareb and Baghi. These categories transform political dissent into capital offenses while cloaking state violence in religious legitimacy.

Mohareb, defined as "someone who wages war against God and society," and Baghi, defined as "a rebel who takes up arms against the legitimate government," provide the legal and Islamic framework for executing those who challenge the system. Crucially, Shi'a jurists aligned with Velayat-e Faqih perceive domestic protesters not as citizens with grievances but as existential threats to the Islamic order. The judiciary has consistently labeled mass protesters under these categories, transforming demands for reform into acts of war against God.

During the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, the judicial system characterized protesters as engaged in "armed rebellion" against God and society. Following the 2026 protests, Asghar Jahangir, spokesperson for the judiciary, again invoked the Mohareb designation. For the regime, enforcing capital punishment in these cases is not discretionary — it is a religious obligation. Failure to act would constitute defiance of divine command, a grave sin in the regime's theological framework.

This creates a powerful internal logic: regime officials face religious pressure to execute those deemed threats to the system. Any hint of leniency risks being interpreted as weakness before God, potentially undermining an official's standing within the ideological hierarchy. The question, then, is whether strategic considerations can override this theological imperative.

When Ideology Trumps Strategy: Six Cases

The Islamic Republic's history reveals multiple instances when the regime chose ideological purity over obvious strategic advantage, often at devastating cost. These cases establish a pattern: when core ideological commitments or clerical authority are at stake, Tehran has repeatedly sacrificed national interests.

The Rushdie Fatwa: Permanent Diplomatic Damage for Clerical Authority

Perhaps no decision better illustrates this pattern than Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie. The timing revealed its strategic irrationality. The Iran-Iraq War had just ended after eight years of devastating conflict. Iran's economy lay shattered, its cities damaged, its population exhausted. The regime desperately needed reconstruction aid and normalized trade relations with Europe.

The fatwa destroyed these prospects immediately. Britain severed diplomatic ties. European investment evaporated. Iran's image as a potentially normalizing state collapsed overnight. Yet the regime never formally rescinded the fatwa, despite repeated opportunities over subsequent decades to do so at minimal political cost.

The logic was ideological, not strategic. Revoking the fatwa would have implied clerical fallibility and undermined the foundational claim that the Supreme Leader's religious rulings carry divine authority. The regime chose long-term ideological credibility over short-term diplomatic and economic gain. Decades later, despite warming relations with Europe at various points, the fatwa remains in force — one of the clearest examples of ideology trumping strategy in modern statecraft.

Hostility Toward Israel: The Enemy That Justifies Everything

Iran's uncompromising stance toward Israel operates on similar logic. While Tehran has at times modulated its approach to the United States, engaging in backchannel negotiations and even cooperation, it has consistently refused to soften its position on Israel. The regime will not recognize the Israeli state, continues to deny Israel's legitimacy in official rhetoric, and maintains maximalist positions even when unnecessary for deterrence.

At multiple junctures — particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s — reducing rhetorical hostility toward Israel could have eased international pressure at minimal internal cost. The regime chose otherwise. Anti-Zionism is foundational to Iran's revolutionary narrative, and Israel functions as the symbolic enemy that legitimizes militarization, regional proxy networks, and domestic repression. Retreat on this front would risk unraveling the regime's ideological coherence, a cost Tehran has refused to pay.

The Hostage Crisis: Revolutionary Consolidation Through Catastrophe

The 1979-1981 seizure of the U.S. Embassy and its 52 hostages followed similar logic. The crisis paralyzed Iran's economy, undermined moderate factions, triggered sanctions, and established a framework of U.S.-Iranian hostility that persists today. Strategically, it was catastrophic. Yet the leadership allowed it to continue for 444 days, even after the costs became undeniable.

The hostage crisis served ideological purposes: it consolidated revolutionary power, destroyed liberal and nationalist rivals within Iran's fractured post-revolutionary elite, and established the regime's anti-imperialist credentials. Ideological mobilization mattered more than international standing or economic welfare. The pattern would repeat: ideology as a tool of internal consolidation, deployed even at enormous external cost.

Exporting the Revolution: Inviting Invasion

In its early years, Iran openly called for overthrowing neighboring regimes, supported subversive movements throughout the Gulf, and rejected basic norms of state sovereignty. These actions directly endangered Iran's security and helped trigger Saddam Hussein's 1980 invasion, which would claim hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives over eight years.

The regime persisted because it was still defining itself, and leaders believed revolutionary expansion was necessary for survival. Retreat would have signaled weakness at this formative moment. Only when survival itself became threatened did expansion give way to defensive consolidation. During the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini doubled down on revolutionary export, claiming the “road to Jerusalem passes through Karbala.”

The 1988 Prison Massacres: Purification During Vulnerability

Even as Iran was ending the catastrophic war with Iraq and desperately needed reconstruction, the regime carried out mass executions of political prisoners in 1988. Strategically, this was unnecessary and damaging, inviting international condemnation at precisely the moment Iran needed to rehabilitate its image.

But the leadership feared ideological contamination more than external pressure. Internal enemies were perceived as existential threats regardless of cost. The regime prioritized ideological purification during a moment of maximum vulnerability — a decision that presaged its approach to future domestic unrest.

Mandatory Hijab: The Symbol That Cannot Bend

Despite repeated waves of unrest — including the massive 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests triggered by Mahsa Amini's death — the regime has refused to abolish mandatory hijab laws. The strategic costs are clear: continuous protests, alienation of youth, loss of legitimacy among educated urbanites, and international condemnation.

Yet ideology prevails. The hijab represents clerical authority over public life. Backing down would signal that mass protest can rewrite Islamic law, establishing a precedent the regime fears more than ongoing unrest. As with the Rushdie fatwa, retreat would imply clerical fallibility — an admission the system cannot afford.

When Survival Trumps Ideology: Seven Cases

The Islamic Republic's willingness to compromise ideology is less well understood but equally consistent. When the regime has faced genuine existential threats, it has demonstrated remarkable flexibility, shelving core revolutionary principles to preserve the system. These cases establish the conditions under which ideological compromise becomes possible.

The "Poisoned Chalice": Khomeini's Strategic Retreat

In 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini accepted UN Resolution 598, ending the Iran-Iraq War on terms he had spent years rejecting. He had insisted the war must continue until Saddam Hussein was overthrown, framing it as a sacred struggle. By 1988, however, Iran faced military exhaustion, economic collapse, U.S. naval intervention in the Gulf, and real risk of elite fracture and popular uprising.

Khomeini described accepting the ceasefire as "drinking a poison chalice" — an unusually candid admission of ideological defeat. The statement established a template: preserve the Islamic Republic even if revolutionary ideals must be shelved. The survival of the system superseded the maximalist goals that had justified eight years of war.

Post-Khomeini Pragmatism: Abandoning Revolutionary Economics

After Khomeini's death in 1989, the regime faced economic ruin and a legitimacy crisis. President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani abandoned radical economic policies including aggressive nationalization and war economy measures, prioritizing reconstruction, foreign investment, and oil revenue. Iran quietly sought better relations with Europe and regional states.

This wasn't ideological liberalization — it was technocratic survivalism. The revolution's form was preserved, but much of its early economic content was softened or discarded. The flexibility demonstrated that revolutionary doctrine could be reinterpreted when the alternative was systemic collapse.

Scaling Back Revolutionary Export: Going Underground

After incidents like the 1992 Mykonos restaurant assassinations in Berlin nearly collapsed Iran's ties with Europe, the regime recalibrated its approach to exporting the revolution. Tehran scaled back overt assassinations abroad, reduced rhetorical calls for overthrowing regional governments, and rebranded its foreign policy language while maintaining proxy networks through less visible means.

The ideology didn't disappear — it went underground and became more deniable. The regime demonstrated it could modulate revolutionary zeal when faced with severe international isolation and intelligence warfare that threatened its security.

The Taliban's Enemy: Post-9/11 Cooperation

Perhaps most striking was Iran's quiet cooperation with the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Despite "Death to America" being a foundational revolutionary slogan, Iran shared intelligence against the Taliban, helped shape the post-Taliban Afghan government, and facilitated U.S. operations in Afghanistan.

This cooperation occurred because Iran feared becoming the next target after Afghanistan, especially with U.S. forces building up on its borders. The Taliban were Sunni extremists hostile to Shi'a Iran, making cooperation strategically logical, but it required temporarily deprioritizing ideological hostility to America — a significant compromise.

The "Grand Bargain" That Wasn't: 2003 Panic

In 2003, as U.S. forces swept through Iraq, Iran reportedly offered comprehensive negotiations covering nuclear transparency, implicit recognition of Israel, and limits on support for militant groups. Whether this offer was fully authorized at the highest levels remains disputed, but its existence reflects genuine elite panic.

The regime was willing to discuss previously untouchable ideological red lines when it believed its survival was directly threatened by U.S. military force. The episode reveals how regime-change fears can override even core revolutionary commitments.

"Heroic Flexibility": The 2015 Nuclear Deal

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) required Iran to accept severe limits on enrichment, intrusive inspections, and rhetorical softening toward diplomacy — all contradicting the regime's narrative of nuclear "resistance" and defiance of Western pressure. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei justified the compromise as "heroic flexibility," a revealing phrase that signals doctrine: ideology is flexible when the system faces existential risk.

The regime calculated that economic strangulation posed a greater threat than ideological concession. The JCPOA demonstrated that even core strategic programs could be constrained when the alternative was internal unrest driven by economic collapse.

Brutal Repression: Sacrificing Islamic Legitimacy

Paradoxically, the regime's repeated brutal suppression of mass protests — in 1999, 2009, 2017-18, 2019, 2022, and 2026 — represents another form of ideological compromise. By killing large numbers of protesters, lying transparently about casualties, and sidelining religious rhetoric in favor of raw coercion, the regime undercuts its own ideological self-image as a just Islamic state.

Yet survival trumps legitimacy. When faced with serious unrest, Tehran has consistently chosen violent repression over accommodation, accepting the damage to its Islamic credentials in exchange for maintaining control. This pattern suggests the regime views immediate survival as more important than long-term ideological consistency.

The Protester's Calculus: Four Determining Factors

Whether Iran executes hundreds of detained protesters depends on how the regime weighs four competing pressures. Each has historical precedent, and their interaction will determine the outcome.

Factor 1: Threat Perception—Existential or Manageable?

The regime's response will depend critically on whether it perceives the recent protests as an existential threat or a manageable challenge. The historical record suggests a clear pattern: when the system itself appears threatened, the regime responds with maximum force regardless of cost.

The 1988 prison massacres occurred precisely because the regime, exhausted from war, feared that surviving political prisoners represented an ideological contagion that could unravel revolutionary authority. The 2019 protests, which saw several hundred killed, were suppressed with exceptional brutality because they spread to working-class areas and included attacks on banks and government buildings — suggesting deeper social rage beyond middle-class reformism.

If regime elites conclude that current protesters represent a broader revolutionary movement rather than contained unrest, the ideological imperative to eliminate "enemies of God" will intensify. Conversely, if they assess the threat as manageable through imprisonment and selective punishment, mass executions become less likely.

Factor 2: International Pressure—Credible or Performative?

The reported Trump administration threat to strike Iran if executions proceed represents an unusual form of external pressure. Historically, Western criticism has rarely deterred Iranian repression, but credible military threats have occasionally altered regime calculations.

The key word is "credible." Tehran has extensive experience managing international condemnation and has shown willingness to accept severe diplomatic costs for ideological goals, as the Rushdie fatwa demonstrates. However, when faced with immediate, concrete threats to regime survival — as in 1988 with the ceasefire, or 2015 with the JCPOA — the regime has proven capable of tactical flexibility.

The challenge for external actors is that threats must be both credible and proportionate. If Tehran believes that refraining from executions will not fundamentally alter its relationship with the United States or spare it from regime-change pressure, the incentive to show restraint diminishes. The regime may calculate that it will face American hostility regardless, making the domestic imperative to execute "enemies of God" more salient than foreign policy considerations.

Factor 3: Internal Elite Cohesion—United or Fractured?

The regime's approach to political violence has historically depended on elite consensus. The 1988 prison massacres required coordination between the judiciary, the IRGC, and clerical authorities. The 2019 crackdown succeeded because hardliners dominated all key institutions.

If elements within the regime question the wisdom of mass executions — whether for pragmatic reasons or concern about long-term legitimacy — implementation becomes more difficult. However, there is little evidence of such dissent currently. President Ebrahim Raisi, who himself is linked to the 1988 executions, represented the ascendancy of hardliners committed to uncompromising repression. His death in 2024 and the selection of Masoud Pezeshkian as president potentially introduces uncertainty, though Pezeshkian operates within severe constraints imposed by hardline institutions.

More important is the IRGC's assessment. If the Guards leadership views executions as necessary for deterrence and system preservation, they will likely proceed regardless of diplomatic costs. The IRGC's increasing dominance over Iranian politics since 2009 means that revolutionary ideology, rather than pragmatic statecraft, increasingly drives decision-making on internal security matters.

Factor 4: Precedent and Deterrence—The Moral Hazard of Restraint

From the regime's perspective, showing mercy creates a dangerous precedent. If protesters believe they can challenge the system without facing capital punishment, the cost of dissent decreases and future unrest becomes more likely. This logic has driven previous waves of executions: the regime seeks to establish that certain forms of opposition carry an absolute, non-negotiable penalty.

The theological framework of Mohareb and Baghi reinforces this calculus. If the regime designates protesters as enemies of God, failing to execute them amounts to defying divine command. This creates internal pressure within the judiciary and security apparatus to follow through on death sentences, independent of external considerations.

However, the regime must also weigh whether mass executions will trigger even larger protests or potentially fracture its own support base. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement demonstrated that excessive repression can generate sustained domestic and international backlash. If executions risk catalyzing a broader revolutionary movement, they become counterproductive even from a pure survival perspective.

The Verdict: Between Ideology and Survival

The historical evidence points toward a grim conclusion: the Islamic Republic is more likely to execute significant numbers of protesters than to show systematic clemency, but the scale will depend on its threat assessment and the credibility of international consequences.

Three factors support the likelihood of executions:

First, theological imperative. The regime has consistently demonstrated that when core ideological principles — particularly clerical authority and the inviolability of the Islamic system — are at stake, it prioritizes ideology over strategic cost. The Rushdie fatwa, mandatory hijab enforcement, and the 1988 massacres all demonstrate this pattern. Designated as Mohareb, protesters represent not political opponents but enemies of God. The religious obligation to punish them creates powerful internal momentum toward execution.

Second, precedent and deterrence. The regime fears that restraint will encourage future unrest. Every major protest wave since 2009 has been met with escalating violence precisely because the regime concluded that insufficient repression in one cycle emboldened protesters in the next. From this perspective, executions serve a functional purpose beyond punishment: they raise the cost of dissent to prohibitive levels.

Third, hardline dominance. The current configuration of Iranian politics favors uncompromising repression. The IRGC, hardline judiciary, and conservative clerical establishment control all key institutions and have shown no indication of questioning the necessity of severe punishment for protesters. The ideological infrastructure that enabled the 1988 massacres remains firmly in place.

However, three factors could limit the scale of executions:

First, regime survival calculus. If mass executions threaten to trigger a broader revolutionary movement or risk catalyzing international military action that endangers the regime itself, Tehran has demonstrated capacity for tactical restraint. The 1988 ceasefire, post-Khomeini economic reforms, and 2015 nuclear deal all show that when survival is genuinely threatened, ideology can be shelved.

Second, international leverage. While Western diplomatic criticism alone has rarely deterred Iranian repression, concrete and credible threats — particularly military action — have occasionally altered regime behavior. The reported Trump administration warning, if backed by clear and proportional consequences, could influence Tehran's calculus. However, this influence is likely to result in reduced numbers rather than wholesale clemency.

Third, tactical flexibility. The regime may opt for a mixed approach: executing a significant but not catastrophic number to establish deterrence while showing selective mercy to manage international pressure and avoid the appearance of mass slaughter. This would allow Tehran to satisfy its ideological imperative to punish "enemies of God" while maintaining plausible deniability about systematic repression.

Policy Implications: The Limits of Engagement

For policymakers in Washington and European capitals, the analysis yields sobering conclusions about leverage and limits. Four implications merit emphasis:

Diplomatic assurances should be treated with extreme skepticism. Foreign Minister Araghchi's reported promise to forgo 800 executions should be understood as tactical rather than binding. The regime has repeatedly demonstrated willingness to mislead international interlocutors when core ideological commitments are at stake. Any claims that executions have been "abrogated" likely represent strategic attempts to manage international pressure rather than genuine policy shifts.

External pressure works only when survival is threatened. The regime has proven willing to endure enormous costs — economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, international condemnation — for ideological goals. Pressure becomes effective only when it credibly threatens the system's existence, as during the 1988 war exhaustion or 2015 economic crisis. Short of such threats, Tehran can absorb external criticism while proceeding with domestic repression.

Ideology and survival are not mutually exclusive. Western analysis often treats these as distinct categories, but the regime views them as integrated. From Tehran's perspective, failing to execute designated enemies of God threatens the ideological foundations that legitimate the system, making such executions a form of survival strategy. Convincing the regime otherwise requires demonstrating that repression endangers the system more than restraint does.

Long-term engagement requires acknowledging immovable positions. Certain ideological commitments — clerical authority, the nature of Islamic governance, and the right to eliminate perceived existential threats — have proven non-negotiable across four decades. Effective policy must work around rather than through these obstacles, focusing leverage on areas where the regime has demonstrated flexibility rather than core theological principles.

Conclusion: The Probability of Tragedy

Will Iran execute the protesters? The weight of historical evidence suggests yes, though likely in calibrated rather than wholesale fashion. The regime will almost certainly proceed with significant numbers of executions, framing them as religious obligations under Mohareb and Baghi designations, while attempting to manage international blowback through strategic ambiguity about precise numbers and limited clemency in high-profile cases.

The theological framework of Velayat-e Faqih, the historical pattern of prioritizing ideology over strategy when clerical authority is at stake, and the current dominance of hardline institutions all point toward repression. Foreign Minister Araghchi's assurances to American envoys should be understood as tactical rather than definitive — a pattern consistent with the regime's historical approach to managing international pressure while pursuing domestic imperatives.

Yet the regime retains capacity for strategic calculation. If executions genuinely risk triggering a broader revolutionary movement or invite military action that threatens system survival, Tehran has demonstrated it can modulate its approach. The question is not whether the regime will show mercy — it will not, in any systematic sense — but rather how many must die before the ideological imperative to punish "enemies of God" is satisfied.

For the protesters awaiting judgment in Iranian prisons, this analysis offers little comfort. They have become pawns in a larger contest between revolutionary ideology and strategic survival, their individual fates determined by calculations that treat human life as instrumental to regime preservation. The Islamic Republic's 45-year history suggests that when this contest plays out, survival wins only when genuinely threatened — and ideology extracts a terrible price along the way.

The international community's ability to alter this trajectory remains limited. Without credible threats to regime survival or genuine willingness to fundamentally alter Iran's strategic environment, external pressure will likely affect the scale but not the fact of repression. The protesters' best hope lies not in diplomatic assurances or Western criticism, but in the regime's own cold calculus: that mass executions might trigger the very revolutionary crisis they are meant to prevent.

That is a thin reed on which to rest the lives of hundreds, but it is the only one history provides.

Hussain Ehsani is a Research Fellow at the Turan Research Center. He previously was a senior researcher at the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Tehran.

Alex Grinberg is a Senior Fellow at the Turan Research Center, a resident Iran expert at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, a research fellow at the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, and a Captain in the reserves of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Intelligence.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

WASHINGTON—A twenty-seven-mile stretch of land running through southern Armenia is poised to reshape the geopolitics of the South Caucasus. On January 13, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Armenian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ararat Mirzoyan announced a detailed framework to implement the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). This US-brokered corridor, which promises to become a vital connectivity link between Europe and Asia, could go down as one of US President Donald Trump’s most impressive foreign policy achievements of his second term.

TRIPP’s connectivity potential

The idea for a US-brokered transport route in southern Armenia that would link the main part of Azerbaijan to Baku’s Nakhchivan exclave grew out of 2025 peace talks between the two countries coordinated by US officials. Azerbaijan wanted to implement a crucial element of its 2020 cease-fire agreement with Armenia—unfettered transport access to Nakhchivan. At the same time, Armenia sought to maintain control over its sovereign territory along the proposed twenty-seven-mile route across its land.

In stepped Trump and his team with a creative solution: a US-led consortium would construct and manage the route, in concert with Armenian authorities, that would in turn safeguard Azerbaijani access to Nakhchivan. At a summit at the White House this past August, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, and Trump agreed to implement TRIPP with a view toward a comprehensive Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal. This was a significant achievement: Armenia and Azerbaijan had clashed for more than thirty years, and they had fought a handful of wars in that time that killed tens of thousands.

Read the full article on the Atlantic Council.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.

Iran's domestic turmoil is usually viewed through the lens of Middle Eastern politics or Tehran's standoff with the West. But hundreds of miles to the northeast, the ripples from Iran's crisis could reshape a cornerstone of Central Asian statecraft: the carefully cultivated strategy of playing multiple powers against one another while maintaining independence from any single patron.

For Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and their neighbors, Iran is more than another regional state. It's a neighboring country, a potential transit route, and a fellow member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. More importantly, it represents access to the Indian Ocean — a key component of Central Asia's strategy to diversify economic ties and reduce dependence on any single major power. Whether that access becomes a liability or an opportunity depends entirely on what emerges from Iran's current crisis.

The Southern Corridor Dreams

For decades, Central Asian leaders have pursued a vision of connectivity that would liberate them from geographic fate. Hemmed in by mountains, steppe, and desert, these former Soviet republics have long depended on routes through Russia to reach global markets. One alternative they envisioned ran south through Iran and Pakistan to warm-water ports like Chabahar and Bandar Abbas.

This wasn't merely about logistics. The southern corridor embodied a broader diplomatic philosophy that Central Asian governments call "multi-vectorism" — the art of cultivating relationships in all directions simultaneously, never becoming too dependent on Moscow, Beijing, or Washington. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, in particular, have styled themselves as pragmatic middle powers more interested in infrastructure deals than ideological camps.

The Turgundi-Herat railway, specialized cargo terminals in Iranian ports, promised transit times slashed by days and shipping costs cut dramatically. Central Asian exporters saw a pathway to South Asian and African markets that bypassed both Russian territory and Chinese-controlled routes.

But infrastructure ambitions are only as solid as the ground they're built on. Persistent violence along the Afghan-Pakistani border has already exposed the brittleness of the southern strategy. Iran's deepening instability adds a new dimension of risk. Climbing insurance premiums, unreliable shipping schedules, and a lack of foreign investment all serve as major barriers. Even without a full regional conflagration, prolonged uncertainty is enough to make the southern route a gamble few companies want to take.

Two Futures, Two Outcomes

The trajectory of Iran's crisis profoundly affects Central Asia, though not in the ways typically discussed. The most important factor is not whether Iran experiences instability, but rather, the direction ultimately chosen by the government that controls Tehran.

If the current period of turmoil results in a continuation of the status quo — where ideological rigidity and international isolation prevail — Central Asia faces a difficult scenario. The years of diplomatic effort and infrastructure investment risked being sidelined, leaving the region's southern corridor as a project of unfulfilled potential.

However, should Tehran emerge from this crisis by recalibrating its priorities toward a more pragmatic, growth-oriented model, the calculus changes entirely. If the leadership moves away from regional ideological pursuits in favor of economic integration, Iran could transform from a source of uncertainty into a cornerstone partner. For Central Asia, a stable and commercially focused Iran would provide the missing piece for a truly independent multi-vector policy, turning a theoretical alternative into a viable reality.

When Neutrality Becomes Impossible

Central Asian states have perfected the art of diplomatic discretion, usually responding to international crises with studied silence or bland calls for stability. Iran, however, defies that playbook. It's not Venezuela or Libya — some faraway trouble spot that can be safely ignored. It's a neighbor, a transit partner, and a fellow member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

That proximity is forcing uncomfortable choices. The SCO has in the past issued the occasional statement expressing concern about external pressure on Iran, but when it comes to Iran's internal breakdown, the organization has made no statements. This exposes an awkward truth that Central Asian governments would prefer not to acknowledge: the multilateral security frameworks they participate in provide diplomatic cover but almost no practical crisis management.

The result is a widening gap between rhetoric and reality. Officially, Central Asian states remain committed to collective security arrangements and principled non-alignment. In practice, they're falling back on bilateral deals and improvised solutions to protect their interests. Multi-vectorism, once an active strategy of diversification, increasingly resembles a reactive scramble to avoid picking sides — unless Iran's political transformation creates the stable partner they've been waiting for.

The Afghanistan Connection

One of the least appreciated dimensions of this crisis involves Afghanistan. Despite Iran's larger economy, Central Asian states trade more with Afghanistan. But repeated closures of the Afghan-Pakistani border have altered commercial ties.

Iran has steadily expanded its economic role in Afghanistan, becoming a vital supplier of fuel, food, and consumer goods. This growing interdependence means Iran's fate and Afghanistan's are now intertwined in ways that directly affect Central Asia. Disruptions in Iran ripple through Afghanistan and ultimately compromise Central Asian access to the south.

If the current regime persists or is replaced by another ideological government, even contained instability in Iran could trigger a collapse in Afghanistan, leading to a potential rise in cross-border terrorism and narcotics smuggling. But a stable, economically focused Iran could help anchor Afghanistan, creating a genuine southern corridor that extends Central Asian reach into South Asia and beyond.

China's Conditional Windfall

While Iran's troubles close doors to the south, they're quietly opening others to the east — but only if those doors stay closed. China's influence in Central Asia may grow not through aggressive expansion but through simple arithmetic: as alternative corridors remain unreliable under continued instability or ideological governance, Beijing's routes look increasingly essential.

China's long-standing interest in stable overland connections that avoid maritime chokepoints aligns neatly with Central Asia's need for predictable partners. As southern uncertainty mounts under the current scenario, Central Asian governments risk becoming more dependent on eastward trade, not less — precisely the outcome multi-vectorism was designed to prevent.

This shift won't announce itself with dramatic summits or treaty signings. It will emerge gradually, visible only in logistics contracts, investment patterns, and the accumulated weight of thousands of small decisions by government officials and business executives reassessing their options.

However, this outcome is not inevitable. If Iran transitions to a growth-oriented government focused on regional integration rather than ideological projects, Central Asia gains precisely what it needs to resist overdependence on any single power. A commercially reliable Iran would give these countries genuine leverage in negotiations with Beijing and Moscow.

The Cost of Miscalculation

Iran's crisis reveals a vulnerability in Central Asian foreign policy that few officials want to confront. Multi-vectorism does not only depend on diplomatic dexterity but also on the physical reliability of transport networks and the stability of neighboring states. When those foundations crack, strategic flexibility evaporates.

The difference between Iran as a persistent problem and Iran as a solution is the difference between Central Asia gradually sliding into Beijing's economic orbit and Central Asia achieving the genuine independence its leaders have long proclaimed. Should non-economic priorities continue to take precedence, the southern gateway may remain a project of unfulfilled potential. However, a pivot toward regional connectivity and mutual growth would provide the stability necessary to turn these strategic aspirations into a functional reality.

For Central Asian governments, this moment demands more than optimistic infrastructure announcements. It requires honest reckoning with the fragility of southern connectivity and greater investment in redundancy over ambition. But it also demands recognition that Iran's political evolution could be the most consequential variable in the region's strategic future.

For Western policymakers debating Iran strategy, the implications extend beyond the Middle East. Pressure on Tehran creates spillover effects that flow through Afghanistan and into Central Asia. But the question isn't just whether to pressure Iran — it's what outcomes that pressure might produceProlonged instability, or the continued survival of ideological priorities over economic pragmatism, drives these countries closer to Beijing at a time when Washington claims to want to expand its options in the region. A transition to pragmatic governance in Tehran, however unlikely, would create genuine opportunities for Central Asian independence that currently exist only on paper.

Iran's internal struggles may seem peripheral to Central Asia's core concerns. However, whatever emerges from Iran will have the potential to redraw the region's economic geography and constrain its strategic choices in ways that could define the next decade. Whether that reshaping pushes Central Asia into deeper dependence on China or liberates it into genuine multi-alignment depends almost entirely on what kind of government ultimately emerges in Tehran.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Eldaniz Gusseinov is a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the Heydar Aliyev Centre for Eurasian Studies at the Ibn Khaldun University and co-founder of Nightingale Int., a political forecasting consultancy. He specializes in European and international studies, focusing on the European Union's foreign policy and its interaction with Central Asian countries, as well as analyzing foreign policy processes in Central Asia.

Turan Reserach Center Director Joseph Epstein joins Alex Vatanka and Alan Eyre on a panel moderated by Negar Mojtahedi to discuss the Netanyahu-Trump meeting and what it means for US-Iran relations.

Watch the full interview here.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center and a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute.

Azerbaijan sits in one of the world’s roughest neighborhoods, squeezed between Russia to the north and Iran to the south. 

Over the past few years, the small, secular but Muslim-majority nation has faced tensions with both Russia and Iran. Relations with Moscow cooled after Russian air defenses accidentally downed an Azerbaijani airliner last December, killing 38. Meanwhile, repeated Iranian threats—including support for the Husseiniyyun, a radical Shia proxy operating terrorist cells in the country and large-scale military exercises on the border—have kept the nation on edge.

Yet Azerbaijan is more than a country at the mercy of large neighbors. It also offers a rare strategic opening for Washington with immediate payoffs in trade, energy security, and regional deterrence.

Baku controls a key stretch of the Middle Corridor—the only land route from Europe to Asia that bypasses both Russia and Iran. It already supplies natural gas to Europe and has helped ease tensions between Jerusalem and Ankara. It has become a bridge to Central Asia, a region the United States has recently prioritized as it seeks alternatives to Chinese rare earths.

Read the full article on the National Interest.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center and a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute.

On the day after the Taliban seized Kabul in 2021, a Turkish Airlines flight carrying 234 passengers arrived in Istanbul. Among them was Sarwar Danish, Afghanistan’s Second Vice President, and two members of President Ashraf Ghani’s fleeing cabinet.

Danish, became the highest-ranking Hazara official of the Afghan government to flee the Taliban without seeking refuge in Iran, despite having lived and studied there for many years. Like many educated Hazara elites, he spent much of the 1980s and 1990s in Iran, pursuing religious studies in Qom, home to the world’ s largest Shiite theological seminary.

Hazara Shiites and Iranian Shiites share the Twelver branch of Shia Islam but differ ethnically. The Hazaras have Mongol-Turkic roots and speak Hazaragi, a Farsi-based language. Iranian Shiites are ethnic Persians who speak Farsi.

Iran’s deepening relations with the Taliban convinced Danish that it was too risky to seek refuge there. Ultimately, he resettled in New Zealand.

In the aftermath of 9/11, U.S. Operation Enduring Freedom brought about the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001. The subsequent Bonn Agreement established a power-sharing framework that reshaped Afghanistan’s political order. Within this arrangement, the Hazaras — the second most powerful opposition to the Taliban after the Tajiks — secured 20 percent of Cabinet positions. Their representation was led by Islamic Unity Party (Hizb-e-Wahdat) leader Mohammad Karim Khalili, who assumed the role of Second Vice President Today, Khalili lives in exile in Turkey.

Following the U.S. intervention in 2001, the Hazaras community has pursued gradual yet consistent efforts to define an identity that extends beyond its Shiite religious affiliation. This process has contributed to a degree of distancing from Iran’s Islamic regime. In their search for a broader cultural and political framework, Hazara political and academic elites have taken tangible steps to cultivate ties with Turkey, positioning themselves as leading actors within the Turkic world. Such outreach has resonated with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s promotion of Pan-Turkism.

Within this context, Turkey’s reception of prominent Hazara political leaders such as Khalili and Mohammad Mohaqqiq, the long-time leader of the People’s Islamic Unity Party of Afghanistan (PIUPA), appears strategically coherent. Both figures, together with Danish, have played active roles in exile politics, most notably through the establishment of the National Resistance Council for Salvation of Afghanistan in Turkey in 2022. The council has formed a political opposition coalition against the Taliban. Both Mohaqqiq and Danish are the among the organization’s founders.

Iran’s relationship with the Taliban has steadily deepened over the past decade, diminishing its appeal as a refuge for Hazara leaders. From 2015 onward, reports indicate that Iran began engaging both diplomatically and militarily with the Taliban, with some analysts noting the establishment of Taliban training infrastructure inside Iran. This alignment was not merely pragmatic but political: Iran appeared intent on cultivating influence with the Taliban, even at the expense of marginalized Afghan groups. In return, Iran secures its eastern border, gains access to the Afghan market, uses the Taliban’s anti-West sentiments as its global P.R., and can stay influential in regional dynamics. In 2023, the relationship was formalized further when Tehran transferred control of the Afghan embassy to Taliban-appointed diplomats.

The Hazara community’s historical experience with Iran is more complex than shared Shiite identity might suggest. During the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, Iran provided support to Hazara jihadist groups, but this assistance weakened Hazara political cohesion after the Soviet withdrawal, some analysts argue.

Moreover, within Hazara narratives, Iran is remembered as having prioritized other Afghan factions — such as the Tajik mujahideen group, Jamiat-e Islami. during the early 1990s civil war that erupted after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, offering more military support, while limiting aid to Hazara groups. Although archival evidence remains sparse, these perceptions left a legacy of mistrust among some Hazara elites toward Tehran.

One of the most significant sources of Hazara mistrust toward Iran stems from Iran’s use of Hazara refugees in its regional military engagements. The Fatemiyoun Brigade, backed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), recruited large numbers of Afghan Hazaras — including minors — to fight in Syria. Human Rights Watch documented cases of Afghan children as young as 14 who were deployed and killed in Syria under Fatemiyoun’s banner.

Beyond such recruitment, reports highlight coercive practices: Hazara refugees allegedly pressured through economic vulnerability or promises of legal residency for fighting in the Fatemiyoun. Human Rights and migrant-rights groups argue that the IRGC exploited refugees’ precarious lives for geopolitical gain. In a 2020 report by the Ceasefire Center for Civilian Rights, IRGC Qud’s Force recruited thousands of Afghans Shias mainly from the Hazara community to fight in Syria. One Afghan described being approached at a mosque in Efsahan, “They suggested we go to Syria to help defend the Shi’a holy shrines from Daesh’, adding that ‘we’d get passports and have an easy life afterwards. We’d be like Iranian citizens and could buy cars, houses…”

For Hazara leaders, these practices transformed Iran from a potential sanctuary into a place of exploitation, casting serious doubts about Tehran’s willingness to protect the broader Hazara community.

Throughout the two-decades of the Afghan Republic, Western governments played a dominant role in the nation’s political institutions, development funding, and security architecture. Hazara leaders actively cultivated these relationships to avoid political marginalization and to ensure external backing. During this period, hundreds of Hazara youth obtained scholarships to leading universities in the U.S. and Europe, with many returning to Afghanistan to occupy senior positions within the Republic’s bureaucracy.

Following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, Western actors continued to influence Afghan realities primarily through humanitarian aid. According to a UNOCHA, approximately $6.7 billion in humanitarian funding was directed to Afghanistan between 2021 and 2024. This sustained support reinforced the perception that Western countries would remain influential players in any future Afghan political landscape. For Hazara leaders, relocation to the West offered not only physical safety but also continued political relevance and access to resources.

Over the past two decades, Hazara diaspora communities have flourished across Western countries — particularly in Europe, Australia, and Canada. These communities have become hubs for political mobilization, advocacy, fundraising, and civil society initiatives. For exiled Hazara leaders, relocation to these countries provides access to established networks, enabling them to maintain influence and engage in transnational activism.

 By contrast, the political space for Hazaras in Iran has remained considerably more constrained limiting the role of any diaspora there as a platform for political leadership. Iran’s domestic political system imposes strict limits on independent political organizing, particularly for refugees. Hazara leaders attempting to operate politically in Iran risk surveillance, repression, and legal obstacles. It is highly unlikely that figures like Mohammad Mohaqqiq, Sarwar Danesh, or Karim Khalili could freely participate in anti-Taliban groups if based in Iran.

Moreover, Iran’s political climate is far less permissive toward the formation of independent political parties or coalitions — especially those that might challenge Tehran’s strategic interests. For Hazara leaders seeking political agency and a long-term voice, Western democracies offer far greater freedom and opportunity than Iran’s restrictive environment.

Hussain Ehsani is a Research Fellow at the Turan Research Center. He previously was as a senior researcher at the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Tehran.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

The dictum that foreign policy doesn’t win elections has long been a part of the conventional wisdom of American politics. Yet as the Republican Party enters an ideological civil war, with the MAGA movement splintering into competing factions, foreign policy has become a major battlefield. 

At the center of the new divide, which will determine what MAGA will stand for after Trump, is Tucker Carlson, who has positioned himself as the leader of an isolationist, grievance-driven bloc. Mixing conspiracy theories, antisemitic tropes, and sympathetic treatment of authoritarian governments hostile to the United States, Carlson has repeatedly worked to undermine Trump-aligned foreign policy goals.

The struggle is less about specific policies, however, than about who will ultimately control the movement. Trump built MAGA and remains its most powerful figure, yet by not policing his message, he has left space for Carlson to shape the narrative. Although Trump once called him “Kooky Tucker Carlson” in response to Carlson’s hysterical warnings that bombing Iran could trigger World War III, he has largely avoided confronting him directly. Carlson has been open about his intent, saying after a recent interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, “What happens after Trump goes? That’s what this is about.” If Trump does not draw clear boundaries, he risks allowing the movement he built to be defined by its most extreme elements.

Read the full article on the National Interest.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.